Every quotable line from the show (all 749 of them), organized by the project domain they speak to, with who said it, roughly when, and a link back to the conversation it came from. From turnaround war rooms to boardrooms, in their own words.
Breaking in, moving up, and building a life in major projects: the most quoted territory on the show.
“A turnaround welder might only do two, maybe three turnarounds a year, actually work six months out of the year, and be putting down three to four hundred thousand dollars a year.”
Grant Stead · ~23:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“When I went up to the turnaround, there were a whole lot of Texas license plates in the parking lot.”
Grant Stead · ~24:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“The turnaround industry would love to have your mind and your body… They can hit me up on LinkedIn, and I will put them to work.”
Grant Stead · ~59:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“I’m really a problem solver. I bring order to chaos. And I think project controls does a lot of that: it brings order to chaos.”
Jovita Stander · ~4:45 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“Part of Vision 2030, which is obviously close to my heart, is to increase the representation of Saudi women in the workforce.”
Jovita Stander · ~2:00 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“Really I’m a gypsy at heart… I think I’ve chosen the right career. Or it chose me, I don’t know.”
Jovita Stander · ~5:05 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“I was actually sitting in my house in Katy, Houston, Texas, when I got a call out of the blue… I did a little bit of research, and I ended up here.”
Jovita Stander · ~17:05 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“My short answer is: go for it.”
Jovita Stander · ~55:15 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“I’m an eternal learner, and I think in project controls you need to be that: you must always be learning something.”
Jovita Stander · ~58:50 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“You never need to apologize for being a woman in this field… but you cannot be easily offended.”
Jovita Stander · ~1:06:20 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“I’ve been very, very blessed in this career. If I had a choice, I would do it all over again.”
Jovita Stander · ~1:07:15 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“Go to somebody that is already experienced and ask them: will you be my mentor?… When I ask for help, nobody has ever said to me, ‘No, I’m not going to help you.’”
Jovita Stander · ~1:08:40 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“The traditional oil companies are shedding people, and the other companies are just desperate for people… there just aren’t enough people. And that’s not counting the data centers.”
James Wiseman · ~6:10 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“If you like science and math, go to college, become an electrical engineer. If you don’t wanna go to college, become an electrician. We need those people so badly in this country. The world needs them.”
James Wiseman · ~29:15 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Try ’em all, try everything. Say yes to everything. If somebody calls and says, do you wanna get on a helicopter and fly offshore tomorrow, can you be there at six in the morning? Say yes.”
James Wiseman · ~56:45 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Finding out what you’re curious about and what you’re interested in is probably more valuable than saying: go to this training class or go to this job board.”
James Wiseman · ~57:15 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“When I looked at the college applications and I saw that there was offshore engineering, I just checked the box… and literally that’s how I got into Berkeley.”
James Wiseman · ~58:00 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Printed media was making a shift from being typeset to being produced via desktop publishing programs, on Apple Mac IIs, to be specific.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~1:10 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Anybody wanting to get into document control should really start with business analysis… it's a really good foundation, and you're not just limited to document control.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~51:10 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“You're flying this airplane at the same time you're building it… I thrive on change, and that's what made document control interesting for me.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~53:35 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“I will take this stack of 300 documents and process them, with the correct naming, that's their jam. They do well with that.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~55:05 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“You really have to have a helping-people mindset… if you're a social being, that's gonna be great.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~55:50 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“The best way would be on LinkedIn… and the name is German, for those who think it's French.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~1:03:50 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Don’t worry about making mistakes. If you’re scared, just go there and just stand there; it’ll improve your confidence when you go the next time.”
Tarun Gohel · ~39:10 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“The more you practice, the more experienced you become: you become an auditor even sitting in your seat. The information comes to you, and you immediately catch that there is something wrong.”
Tarun Gohel · ~41:30 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“Be curious. Whenever I want to learn something, I always ask: what does the accountant know that I don’t know?”
Tarun Gohel · ~46:20 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“I never applied for any position. I just got curious… In the evening I used to sit with the planning engineer and say, what can I do for you? … That’s how I learned Primavera.”
Tarun Gohel · ~47:40 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“I feel like maybe Leonardo da Vinci would’ve been in project controls.”
Orion Matthews · ~48:20 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“It is a true honor… great meeting you, like-minded people.”
Tarun Gohel · ~52:10 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“Let’s just start with a blank page and say: nobody knows how to do this. We need people who are flexible: ‘I’m with you, I’m gonna figure it out.’”
Geoff Ryan · ~33:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“Most often when we think we have an electrician, we think we’ve got an electrician. In the data center world, that’s not true: high voltage and connecting light bulbs are two separate professions.”
Geoff Ryan · ~40:10 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“Take your resume and go to one, or go to several. The industry is hungry for people… You don’t have to show up and say ‘I have done this before.’ Just: ‘I’m flexible. I wanna learn.’”
Geoff Ryan · ~45:30 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“25% of the jobs that we work now did not exist when we were at college… give yourself an engineering or a data science foundation, but understand that gets you to the starting line.”
Geoff Ryan · ~51:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“I got drawn more to the contractor side because I think they did a better job at selling these mega projects… the big contractors really make a lot of their profit on the very, very large projects.”
Roger Farish · ~1:45 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“It was an amazing learning experience, a little bit unsustainable, as you can imagine: all that responsibility, multiple time zones, offices, folks.”
Roger Farish · ~5:10 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“Being a generalist in the front end of projects is very important… Push your manager to give you things that are outside of your comfort zone, maybe those not-so-desirable assignments, so you can draw on those experiences and ultimately get involved in the front end.”
Roger Farish · ~51:00 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“In the end, it’s finance. NPV and IRR are finance terms… you need to understand those market elements that ultimately feed an economic model for a project.”
Roger Farish · ~52:15 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“I would add statistics to the list as well, for risk, and even when you’re doing economic models.”
Roger Farish · ~54:00 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“It began as a young boy in West Africa who learned early that hard places can shape strong people. Engineering became my doorway; curiosity became my compass.”
Akin Oni · ~2:10 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“The joy of solving meaningful problems with good people.”
Akin Oni · ~2:50 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“The right people, not the best people, in the right number, at the right time. Miss one and the foundation is shaky.”
Akin Oni · ~11:45 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“What got you here, good mechanical engineering, will not get you there, which is project leadership.”
Akin Oni · ~48:20 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Let your character rise above your résumé.”
Akin Oni · ~1:09:10 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Build relationships like your life depends on them, because your project does.”
Akin Oni · ~1:05:30 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Curiosity is any professional’s best friend.”
Akin Oni · ~1:05:20 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Mentorship is a bidirectional relationship. If it’s one-directional, there’s a problem.”
Akin Oni · ~1:04:30 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Learn not only tools, learn people.”
Akin Oni · ~1:06:50 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“We treat every new city like a classroom.”
Akin Oni · ~1:14:50 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“If you desire to grow, you will experience fire.”
Akin Oni · ~1:18:30 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“The first project I was trained on was $3 billion. The second project was $12 billion, and that kind of project in Saudi is really normal in terms of the numbers.”
Omar Habib · ~3:20 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“Whenever I knew something, I sat and taught my colleagues. By time they start asking questions you can’t answer, so you go search for it and come back to them again.”
Omar Habib · ~8:15 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“Don’t get stuck in knowledge hell, where you are only reading… Reading and applying is another experience.”
Omar Habib · ~1:08:40 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“You don’t want to end up a draftsman who models but doesn’t understand it, or someone who does data but doesn’t understand the data.”
Omar Habib · ~1:15:40 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“Start with the tool related to your field first: Revit, Navisworks… then strengthen your technical understanding before going heavily into the tools.”
Omar Habib · ~1:15:30 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“For anyone still in university, I’ll be more than welcome to support and help… I find it a really nice way to pay it off, to help the guys still in progression.”
Omar Habib · ~1:19:40 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“It's hard to keep a full-time risk manager busy on typical projects, unless we're talking about very large engineering or construction projects.”
Kim Essendrup · ~24:30 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“My podcast co-host likes to say that project managers aren't made, they're born. It's something you really wanna do and just naturally do.”
Kim Essendrup · ~26:20 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“I’ve been on all sides of the table: the engineering side, the contractor side, the subcontractor side, a little bit on the client side. But for the past decade I’ve been on the owner’s-rep side.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~2:40 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“I was a little bit lucky: after my PhD I received an offer from CBRE to be the cost manager for the Microsoft portfolio in Redmond… then I was the program controls manager for this campus for four years.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~3:20 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“Ask yourself: what happens after this project? You hire a team of 20 to 30 resources for two or three years. Do you have jobs for them after this project is completed?”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~13:40 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“People start feeling worried about job insecurity… when they get the best opportunity, they leave, and then there’s no one to close out the project and turn the building over.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~15:30 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“Go to any project management or project controls company and ask them: what’s your number one challenge? They will tell you finding resources, finding the right talent.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~18:10 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“If I find the best resource and this is their salary, I am paying for it. That’s an investment in the project… You will definitely save money, you’ll definitely save time.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~19:20 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“If you’re a construction manager, you shouldn’t be doing it remotely: you’re on site day to day. But cost management, scheduling, you can manage remotely.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~20:50 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“If I want someone immediately, will I be able to hire them? Definitely no, the process takes months.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~22:40 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“If you’re an expert in a specific software that is now outdated, yes, you’re going to get replaced. But if you’re learning the latest technology, you’ll be hot on the market and everyone will be looking for you.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~26:00 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“Even if I don’t have a current role, I try to interview two, three candidates a day… When the opportunity comes, I have my list.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~28:50 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“Because I’ve done it, building the templates, the process, the reports, I know the challenges. You can easily identify if this person has done it before or just has general knowledge about the topic.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~31:40 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“If you’re just complaining because someone is doing something, but you don’t come up with a solution, that’s a red flag.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~33:40 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“Go to a company that invests in your growth, not just the compensation.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~1:04:10 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“Understand the client culture and the needs of the project scope before making any staffing decisions.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~1:05:00 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“Join an existing PMO team, learn the process, the cost management, the scheduling, the communication, the data analytics, and then you’ll be able to build the entirety.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~1:05:20 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“I’m not a good reader, I would say. I learn through attending conferences, workshops… and even just asking ChatGPT.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~1:05:50 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“You would be surprised: number one wasn’t finance. Number one was the career growth… You may have the best offer for your current position, but you stayed the same way for ten years.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~1:07:10 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“I wanted to be a rock guitarist like Ritchie Blackmore, but apparently my fingers and brain don't work like his, so I had to get a job.”
Martin Darley · ~5:15 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“"Someone even suckered me into co-authoring a paper for this organization called AACE that I'd never heard of before, and that started my decline," he jokes.”
Chris Caddell · ~7:15 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“Project controls is kind of the accidental profession: you get introduced to scheduling, estimating, cost management or risk management… and that accidentally becomes the focus of your career.”
Michael Nosbisch · ~7:55 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“The references always talked about becoming a project manager someday, never about becoming an estimator, a cost engineer or a scheduler. That can become the base of a very lucrative career.”
Michael Nosbisch · ~8:40 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“Talk about an accidental career: getting into doing disputes and claims is something I didn't even realize existed.”
Michael Bennink · ~9:25 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“You need to get qualified, you need to get certified, just get it in the bank… It's your own credential and you carry it with you. You go international and you've got letters behind your name, and people start listening.”
Martin Darley · ~13:45 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“We started off working from home, and now it's working remote, and when you put the remote into the equation, where is it? It might not be your home. It could be a technical center in India or a financial center down in Argentina.”
Martin Darley · ~28:35 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“If you're in your bedroom on a laptop, how do you manage your career?… We're still humans: out of sight is out of mind.”
Martin Darley · ~29:25 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“This is not your parents' remoteness. Working remotely now is a lot different than it looked like six years ago.”
Chris Caddell · ~30:45 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“New people starting out working remotely, not getting that interaction and that benefit you get from being around others who are experienced in your field, that worries me… I'm tired of webinars. I want face-to-face meetings. I wanna socialize.”
Michael Bennink · ~33:15 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“There's a whole subset within the project-controls community, road warriors… willing to go international and be on site for years, putting a nest egg away before they retire.”
Michael Nosbisch · ~39:35 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“What you get out of this association as a contributor is exponential over just being a user.”
Chris Caddell · ~46:45 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“I was a Marine in Desert Shield, Desert Storm when I was 25… It gets better than this. Take the lessons wherever you happen to get your start, and leverage the things you can apply down the road.”
Michael Nosbisch · ~49:25 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“At 25 I was already running the M&E side of three petrochemical projects… I was a bit of a train wreck. It was at that point: slow down, think it through. That's when I started the academic period of my life… I had a plan then.”
Martin Darley · ~50:25 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“Always be asking questions. Always be trying to learn something new.”
Chris Caddell · ~51:30 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“Have some urgency to get where you want to go. Be confident, but take the time to really learn things… Life comes at you fast.”
Michael Bennink · ~51:40 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“I kept a note card on my little kitchen island that said Work for the owner. International. I listed my salary, and I just kept looking at that for a year. Right at the end of that project, I got the call that they needed a planner urgently in Angola.”
Travis Arlitt · ~3:25 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“When you impress a project team or a business manager, they just take you with them as a known commodity, especially when you’re going from domestic to overseas. They don’t want to take a risk on an unknown.”
Travis Arlitt · ~4:45 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“That note card led to those thin threads, just doing good work for the right people, and some luck involved. You kind of get what you keep your mind focused on.”
Travis Arlitt · ~5:20 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“These guys had been building these facilities since before I was born, some of them. And here I was telling a pipeliner: hey, next week you gotta dig a trench and bed the pipe. They were looking at me with blank stares.”
Travis Arlitt · ~7:50 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“You have to do your core job extremely well. Only then can you dip your toe and start experimenting with stuff that’s beyond that core job function people brought you on to handle.”
Travis Arlitt · ~28:00 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Not every move is gonna be sunshine and roses. I’m a sailor. I love wind, I love water. Malaysia has no wind and no sailing… If it’s hard, don’t leave. Go through the hard.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:21:50 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Find out what you’re really good at and just quadruple down on that. Whatever is in the project world that you love, that comes as natural as breathing, go all in on that.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:23:10 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Your most valuable skill in the world of AI is your ability to imagine and create… If you’re quiet, ideas are gonna come to you that would never come from AI. And then you use AI to execute wildly on those ideas.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:23:40 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“That two-hour walk in the woods might be more valuable than two months of actively working, if you can come up with an idea. And the wonderful thing about AI is you can execute so fast now.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:25:40 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“I worked probably 30 minutes a week, 45 minutes max, and I shifted the entire trajectory of that whole train of one of the biggest LNGs… That little component was worth two or three months of strategy.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:27:50 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“You have to be comfortable with not working so hard and thinking that your worth is coming from the work… If you’re uncomfortable with that, you’re gonna work yourself to the bone and you’re not gonna get those insights.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:28:55 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“I think time sheets are a complete lie when it comes to knowledge workers: they assume that time is fungible… they’re on different number lines, man.”
Orion Matthews · ~1:26:00 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“I was always curious: if we are struggling to deliver small projects in the industrial sector, how are they delivering huge megaprojects thousands of miles away? That was the reason I started my MBA.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~2:20 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Even today, I consider it a platform for my systems thinking.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~8:05 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“In engineering companies, to be honest, anybody can be a project manager. We couldn’t train everybody: it was becoming extremely expensive, and a lot of them were not interested.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~56:00 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“‘Why do I have to issue the invoice? Why do I have to take care of risk?’ Because now you are a project manager in addition to the technical expert.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~56:45 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Look at what you are interested in and what makes you happy… and don’t let others tell you what you are capable of. Decide for yourself.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:17:00 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Starting a business in Canada is not easy. Consulting at all is not easy. I’m not a hundred percent sure even today if it was the right decision, but I owed it to myself to give it a try.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:17:30 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Everybody who manages a project needs technical knowledge of that specific area. I didn’t have a civil background. I took track-geometry and train-control courses, because you need the basis to communicate with the team.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:19:00 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“We are in a rush to go fast, but we need to be patient, step by step. Accept more responsibility, be brave, try different things… this life is beautiful, and there are so many things to learn.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:19:40 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Coming into this industry, you absolutely need hands-on site work… there are certain nuances that you learn on site that you otherwise wouldn’t get at home or in the corporate headquarters.”
Christina Robinson · ~4:55 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“He took a shot on me, and he really helped to develop me during that time.”
Christina Robinson · ~4:05 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“Something told me: don’t listen to them. They have no real-world experience; they’re just like you. So I changed my major.”
Christina Robinson · ~2:20 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“Social media has programmed them to see only the finished product, but not all the work that came before it.”
Christina Robinson · ~7:55 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“Yes, we do. There is a knowledge-transfer gap, but then there’s also the way in which we work now. It’s very different.”
Christina Robinson · ~6:20 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“It’s gonna take the elders and the more seasoned professionals to come down and meet those students and the younger generation where they are.”
Christina Robinson · ~9:10 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“They’re looking for easier workflows. They’re looking for more flexibility. Obviously the pay… and they require autonomy. If they don’t have those things, you don’t have a new workforce to replace the ones who are aging out.”
Christina Robinson · ~10:20 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“In 2015 I said: there’s no reason why our work is 90% on a computer and we have to come to an office every day to look at each other. Then what happened in 2020? Everyone was forced to be at home, which means if corporations wanted to, they would.”
Christina Robinson · ~18:40 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“People are trying to go back to the way things were pre-COVID. It is never going to happen. You’re gonna pray it in; it’s not gonna happen.”
Christina Robinson · ~19:20 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“There’s been this misconception that the more miserable people are, the harder they work to prove themselves. Not anymore: people are not self-loathing or being sacrificial lambs anymore.”
Christina Robinson · ~23:45 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“Oh, well, your little cousin data center is now coming. So good luck with that.”
Christina Robinson · ~25:25 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“Go to them first. You can make as many assumptions and guesstimates as you want about what you think they want. Talk with them, actually have real conversations with them.”
Christina Robinson · ~28:10 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“The millennials were able to see how the goalposts kept being moved, and those promises never came into fruition. So the younger generations are like: oh no, y’all did them like that. You can’t do us like that.”
Christina Robinson · ~32:50 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“Discretionary is the worst kind of bonus to get, because if your boss doesn’t like you, guess what? You’re not getting a good bonus at all.”
Christina Robinson · ~33:50 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“As a Black woman, there has never been a time where I’ve been in a corporate space where I felt like I could be myself. Never.”
Christina Robinson · ~37:45 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“It is not a reflection of who you are as a person or your performance; it’s a direct reflection on those people and their own insecurities.”
Christina Robinson · ~38:25 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“I’m never coming back to this kind of situation. I’m gonna formulate my own business and I’ll figure it out. That’s what Black American women have been doing since the beginning of time: we know how to make a dollar out of 15 cents.”
Christina Robinson · ~41:55 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“We’re not interested in being invited to a table that doesn’t want us there anyway; we’re gonna go be at our own damn table. We’ve been building our own tables, and it feels much better that way.”
Christina Robinson · ~47:40 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“If I hadn’t had that experience, I could easily be in the category of people that are like: oh, this is solved. This doesn’t happen anymore, because nobody saw it happen to me.”
Orion Matthews · ~45:30 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“Safety needs to be there. Anybody who has physical labor absolutely needs to be there… But if you’re building schedules, cost reports, forecasts, processes, you don’t necessarily need to be in the office to do that all the time.”
Christina Robinson · ~50:55 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“Once you bring them on board, now it is part of your problem… It costs more for you to bring someone on board than to take care of the ones you already have.”
Christina Robinson · ~55:15 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“In every level of life, you’re gonna need a bridge of people to get you from one place to the next… The more people that know you, like you, champion for you, that is a direct reflection of your success in any area of life.”
Christina Robinson · ~1:01:35 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“You’re about one to two degrees away from whatever it is that you’re looking to come into fruition. Start telling people what you’re interested in.”
Christina Robinson · ~59:15 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“Go where those people are. Wherever they are, you need to be there. That’s it.”
Christina Robinson · ~1:02:15 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“You can transform and you can be different at any stage in life… Your perspective does matter, and there’s an audience of people waiting to hear it.”
Christina Robinson · ~1:03:50 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“As we rolled out this global risk management system, they realized they didn’t have anybody to manage it, and so that became my role… took on the role of risk lead and ended up with some of the very large projects that they had.”
Matt Mitchell · ~1:40 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“I found it to be pretty effective to be insourced… certainly I have a little bit of a bias that I can recognize there… you can have success either way.”
Matt Mitchell · ~1:00:15 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The very curious. Someone who’s very curious and loves to always be learning, because every project is different.”
Matt Mitchell · ~1:05:40 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“A project manager might work on three projects in their career… a risk manager, you are likely going to work on dozens of projects.”
Matt Mitchell · ~1:06:30 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“I got into the oil and gas industry and the capital projects through quality assurance, actually.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:15 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“I really like drinking beer. However, I had this realization that working at the brewery and smelling hops every day wasn’t really something I loved.”
Iwona Wilson · ~2:10 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“That was like an entire course. If you have someone starting on a major project, we could just clip that and give it to them.”
Orion Matthews · ~9:00 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Very few organizations actually teach how to think through uncertainty, how to frame opportunities, how to create alignment around key stakeholders, how to identify, name, and challenge assumptions.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:34:00 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Seek opportunities where you can polish your critical thinking skills.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:10:50 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“There’s nothing more empowering for young individuals than giving them tools so they can make their own decisions confidently.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:12:40 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“If you think you're stuck where you're at, it's most likely because you have stopped measuring yourself… Journaling and mentoring, these two things can transform anyone's life.”
Omer Iqbal · ~1:00–2:00 · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
“You're literally seeing under the bonnet how the engine works, and that sometimes makes you a more informed person than the driver himself… If you like connecting the dots, and you want every day to be a brand-new challenge, project controls is the space for you.”
Omer Iqbal · ~3:00–4:00 · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
“Stay curious. Ask questions. Understand the underlying value, why the business needs it, why your society needs it… And never confuse an activity with a value.”
Omer Iqbal · ~0:00 · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
“Reach out to us. We are happy to give you advice.”
Omer Iqbal · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
What AI, analytics and clean data actually change on billion-dollar projects: hype separated from practice.
“If your data's late, an executive will always remember that: it says the data is not trustable. If you can't produce the data on time, on demand… where is this coming from?”
Orion Matthews · ~54:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“Analytics without the context of the crew, and without strong discipline, results in bad analytics. And once you lose trust, it's over.”
Orion Matthews · ~56:45 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“By not just reaching in and grabbing information, people trust the data a lot more: they can literally see who uploaded it, on what day, and confirmed it. And we know it's real.”
Grant Stead · ~58:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“What we're finding is that well-guided AI is able to produce better results than what humans can.”
Grant Stead · ~1:08:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“We processed 8,000 piping isometrics, spot-validated against every other source, in less than a week, and ended up with a material-takeoff database of almost a hundred thousand records. Fully validated.”
Grant Stead · ~1:09:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“We eat our own dog food. We build things so that we can use them, and I am in the saddle using it.”
Grant Stead · ~1:15:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“There's a lot of promise of technology, and people forget that you still can't be lazy. You have to get in the chair and do the work.”
Grant Stead · ~1:17:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“I told him: my CTO lives 20 minutes from right here. You will have his address, and you can go knock on his door. The sigh of relief was audible.”
Grant Stead · ~1:21:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“We don't build a technology and tell our clients to conform their process our way. We build our technology around their process… I think of us as kind of a rogue IT group.”
Grant Stead · ~1:22:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“People who think no-code, low-code tools should lead process are missing the point. Sure, you can build a company that way, but it's like gardening without a spade.”
Orion Matthews · ~1:24:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“It comes back to the old thing, garbage in, garbage out… these wonderful tools will not help the decision makers make good decisions for the project.”
Jovita Stander · ~50:50 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“Finding the needle in the haystack of what’s going wrong on a project is very difficult… especially when you can’t be everywhere all the time.”
James Wiseman · ~32:40 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Why are people clicking from pipe support to route pipe these days? There’s probably something gonna happen there.”
James Wiseman · ~33:10 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“I'm seeing it have more and more impact, and not five years down the road. It's happening now.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~45:40 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“OpenText and M-Files: they're developing AI in their products… one easy win was just making searches easier, because it allows you to use natural-language searches like you do for Google.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~46:00 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“You can just verbalize it, and there's your canned report.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~47:10 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“AI is going to accelerate, but not replace, and certainly not for many, many years… until all of those nuances are verbalized and recorded, you're still gonna need the human perspective.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~48:00 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“As the price per unit goes down, consumption goes up. I would not be surprised if the inverse of job losses happens for doc control… you would actually see demand increase.”
Orion Matthews · ~48:50 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“It will still not take the core skills of project controls away, but it’ll really help to boost productivity.”
Tarun Gohel · ~44:20 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“You can imagine going to Google and telling them that they suck at data. But they do, ’cause they don’t know what to do with it.”
Geoff Ryan · ~28:10 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“We have great success when we have our data scientists paired with our grizzly old construction guy… ideally you bring them together to build consumable data, which is actually how every app on your phone works.”
Geoff Ryan · ~31:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“Something I’m working on for 2026 is a gold-standard open-source data model: this is how we model this information, and I don’t care what systems you have.”
Orion Matthews · ~58:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“No existing owner data that we have reviewed to date has told us there’s nothing to learn here. There’s always lots to learn… In the end, that’s the golden nugget.”
Roger Farish · ~26:10 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“I hear a lot of talk, but to me the proof is in the pudding… I think some people are calling a lot of rules-based processes AI, and I think it’s a stretch.”
Roger Farish · ~45:10 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“If you’re not contributing all the data, then that means some of the other organizations are not contributing all the data. And then what does that mean? That the data is not a good dataset.”
Roger Farish · ~42:30 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“I’ve leveraged AI in getting my less experienced engineers and cost estimators up to speed… then we have a summary discussion to ensure they understand the concept well. If they pass the test, we move on.”
Roger Farish · ~43:50 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“Our work is very bespoke, very much one-off… there’s a much greater opportunity for implementation of AI on the execution side, and what we learn there will ultimately permeate into the front end.”
Roger Farish · ~46:00 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“I had to tell them: you are a cloud engineer now. ‘Well, technically this is not really the cloud.’ No, this is the cloud, unfortunately for you.”
Orion Matthews · ~46:50 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“Never allow AI to write for you; allow AI to write from you.”
Akin Oni · ~53:40 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“AI will not replace people, but it will replace teams that refuse to use it.”
Akin Oni · ~57:30 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Due diligence that took weeks now takes hours.”
Akin Oni · ~53:10 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Allow AI to do what AI can do, but do what only you can do. AI does not know what’s important to you.”
Akin Oni · ~1:00:20 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“The talented Power BI analysts can do everything with the data, but they’re not talented in storytelling. They’re really good at finding the issue, not at presenting it.”
Omar Habib · ~58:00 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“We gave the agent access to the emails and it dug through every single one against the criteria… What we planned to get done in two months, we got done in about ten days.”
Omar Habib · ~1:04:00 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“Someone submitted 30% last month and 17% this month. He’s subtracting from last month’s progress. It’s really cool QA/QC.”
Omar Habib · ~1:05:50 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“We proposed two months with seven engineers; we came back in three weeks, and we added another week just to verify the information. You find a way to accelerate it; you need to make sure it’s right.”
Omar Habib · ~1:07:30 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“It affects productivity, but it also makes people a little bit lazy, honestly.”
Omar Habib · ~1:11:40 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“Where AI is really helpful is when you know what you don’t know… If you don’t know what you don’t know, I think you just become a menace.”
Orion Matthews · ~1:13:10 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“We will always need the people with the good judgment… managers are not gonna want to put blame or accountability on an AI. It needs to be a person who's in charge.”
Kim Essendrup · ~27:30 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“We launched our first AI feature over a year ago, which in AI terms is a century, right?”
Kim Essendrup · ~28:00 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“In one click I had 75% of his risk register. Just absolutely mind-blowing.”
Kim Essendrup · ~29:30 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“AI won't replace your job, but people with AI probably will.”
Orion Matthews · ~29:50 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“Chat with your RAID log: for my portfolios this past year, what is the primary root cause for impacts to our budget? … It just really empowers you, makes you smarter, helps you make better decisions.”
Kim Essendrup · ~30:40 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“The AI tool is not really a replacement for judgment. You should always make sense of what you’re seeing; you shouldn’t rely on it a hundred percent. It’s still being matured.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~24:10 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“There should be AI estimating tools… It’s not there yet, but it’s coming. Definitely. Same for baseline schedules.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~24:40 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“It’s not a replacement for the resources. We should use it as a tool to help us manage more projects with the resources challenge we have today.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~25:20 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“If all your employees are 500% more productive because of AI, why would you fire them? That’s like the worst time.”
Orion Matthews · ~25:40 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“There is always a human factor… I need to validate the information, whether it’s coming from a person or from AI. I don’t rely on one source.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~27:20 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“Not yet… For me, ChatGPT is definitely a game changer. It’s not a hundred percent reliable, but it does what I need.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~28:20 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“Most important for me: data and analytics… That’s my key person on the PMO, who makes sure all the information is accurate and on time.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~49:55 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“Go back and look at large engineering projects at the turn of the century, rooms full of engineers doing calculations. That was a change pushed by technology. AI will be the same: it's gonna be disruptive, but it's also gonna be an opportunity.”
Michael Bennink · ~19:25 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“There's a lot more data now available than what used to be… if you can have these large models pull in more data, we might find correlations to things that we'd never even thought of.”
Chris Caddell · ~20:15 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“I've waited all my career for some enabler like AI… How long does it take to get a monthly report out, collating the data, getting approvals, issuing it, having the meeting, and no one pays any attention to it? AI is gonna be right in your face.”
Martin Darley · ~20:35 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“I had a guy in drilling who could produce a thousand reports. Fantastic, which one do I read? It ended up three, which were the three we always read historically.”
Martin Darley · ~21:15 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“Until it fully takes over, someone's gonna have to make the decisions… we've seen in history where financial models that were depended on faltered and literally caused the market to crash.”
Michael Bennink · ~22:05 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“AI should speed up the process, but at the end of the day, it's gonna take someone who understands the project to interpret what AI is providing and make a recommendation… That's not gonna be replaced by AI at any time that I can see.”
Michael Nosbisch · ~23:25 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“"We do a terrible job at projects: benchmarking tells us that 1% of the time we hit cost, schedule and production in the oil and gas business. Just hitting 15 or 20% would be a mega improvement." (Directional, cited from memory.)”
Martin Darley · ~25:05 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“Tell them we're gonna send you to a job site in the middle of Mississippi for six months punching time cards, you wouldn't be able to recruit them. Tell them we're gonna sit you in an office in downtown Houston with AI interrogating all this data, they'll take the job.”
Martin Darley · ~25:25 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“I use AI; if somebody took it away from me, I’d hunt them to the end of the earth to get it back… But you always gotta get back to the defensible. It just can’t be a black-box output.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:06:40 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Hey Claude, what can we do with this? Oh, we can do this: just upload the code here. I’ve done this 400 times now. I’ve probably written fifty, sixty thousand words of prompts.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:08:20 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Instead of sifting through these bid docs and picking out the calendars and all the stuff… you get a very, very distilled view of the plan, instead of spending days and weeks.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:09:40 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“‘This has definitely got 50,000 tons of steel in the pipe rack.’ Are you sure? That seems like a lot. ‘Oh, you’re absolutely right, it’s actually 5,000 tons.’ I was off by ten, and that happened a lot… It can sound extremely confident. If you take that confidence without knowing the fundamentals, you’re gonna get bit for sure.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:13:30 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“If you don’t know what you don’t know, I’m not sold yet that AI is gonna be your hundred-x multiplier… you don’t want someone doing surgery on you that doesn’t know how to do surgery, using AI.”
Orion Matthews · ~1:12:20 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“You solve some problems, and then it creates new problems. Who will be responsible to maintain this huge monster now?”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~57:50 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Our industry is a little bit anti-AI, which I understand, but like it or not, it will be a part of our day-to-day life in managing megaprojects. And it can create a lot of value.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:01:20 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“A big part of our planning and even monitoring teams will be replaced, project controls mainly, the pure analytical part. But the way humans interact, decide and analyze is different: stakeholder management, communication.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:02:30 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Integrating these platforms is extremely expensive and not cost-effective… the best thing might be integrating via agent solutions at the reporting level.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:03:40 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“The prediction is that by 2028, 15% of all decisions will be made autonomously within the construction space… I think of it as a decision accelerator.”
Orion Matthews · ~1:05:20 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“If you have not invested in your software, you’re going to have to heavily invest in your resources: a lot of manual input, data entry, data mining.”
Christina Robinson · ~12:50 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“Getting handed a Palm Pilot for your first day at work, you’re like, I quit. I’m not doing this.”
Orion Matthews · ~13:20 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“A fancy, complex tool sitting around a workshop is a big waste of their time, and they’ll see it as that.”
Matt Mitchell · ~45:20 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“If you choose too complex of a tool and it’s too difficult to do that export and review… it just won’t get done, and it won’t get updated, and you’ll have bad data in there.”
Matt Mitchell · ~47:30 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The AI that we’re using in 5 years or 10 years is going to be reading the data from today.”
Matt Mitchell · ~51:45 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“I think Monte Carlo was maybe sort of a rudimentary early application of AI… I think AI will outpace Monte Carlo as an approach to the potential outcomes of a project.”
Matt Mitchell · ~52:50 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“It really does seem like, yeah, maybe it is like a super Monte Carlo in a way.”
Orion Matthews · ~53:40 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“I still think for a lot of project scope you have to have the expert opinions. AI can do a lot, but you need people who have the experience and have been through it.”
Matt Mitchell · ~55:10 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“If we let AI make decisions for us, there are still consequences that will have to be absorbed. And the AI is not gonna pay for whatever’s gonna come out of our decisions.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:16:20 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Making sure that technology is not ahead of the humans.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:18:30 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“A fool with a tool is still a fool… but now it's dangerous.”
Omer Iqbal · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
Uncertainty, contingency and the obstacles between a project and success.
“That's where you're introducing risk: that a structure or piece of equipment could fail, and you could involve injury or even death to field personnel.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~21:35 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Every risk must have a trigger… If you don’t have the trigger, you don’t know when to take an action to mitigate it.”
Tarun Gohel · ~17:10 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“Risks are everywhere; if you try and quantify every risk, your project value will double.”
Tarun Gohel · ~14:40 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“When your project is impacted by $2 million, is it risky on a $20 billion CapEx?… There has to be a threshold.”
Tarun Gohel · ~15:35 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“Every mitigation trigger must have a mitigation owner assigned, who is going to take the action, and when.”
Tarun Gohel · ~20:00 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“We faced almost all the major risks… Where we couldn’t do anything about it, one of the root causes was nobody knew what the trigger was.”
Tarun Gohel · ~18:20 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“As projects get bigger, the risks become exponential: you just have an increasing number of interfaces, and every one of those interfaces has not only additional cost but additional risk. These monsters of projects that have all these interfaces really are the riskiest of projects.”
Roger Farish · ~19:10 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“Bechtel published that 98% of mega projects, a billion dollars and above, fail to meet at least one of their objectives, whether it’s cost, schedule, or another very important project objective.”
Roger Farish · ~19:40 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“You may think you’re sharing risk with a lender. No. They are already charging you, hugely, for the money they’re giving you access to.”
Akin Oni · ~29:50 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Risk: where can this story break? Because a project is a story.”
Akin Oni · ~36:30 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Projects are hard. Projects are statistically almost more likely to go wrong than they are to go right.”
Kim Essendrup · ~4:00 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“There are a lot of people who are a lot more skilled than me when it comes to risk management. I just have had a lot of risks go wrong, so I have a lot of experience on the wrong side of that.”
Kim Essendrup · ~3:45 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“It's incumbent on us as project leaders, project controllers, to stop and take a moment and say: okay, where can this thing go off the rails, and how can I avoid that?”
Kim Essendrup · ~5:10 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“Go back to the source and say: when you decided to do this project, what were your basic foundational assumptions? Did you already realize there were risks involved, and if so, what were those?”
Kim Essendrup · ~6:30 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“If you've got past risk registers from similar projects, they've already paved the way, maybe they've already stubbed their toe on the same rocks that are threatening you.”
Kim Essendrup · ~7:20 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“As I get in my car and drive, I could get in an accident. I'll just close my eyes. If you do little things like, I don't know, open your eyes, you can see what could be coming at you.”
Kim Essendrup · ~8:20 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“When you come up to a yellow light, do you floor it and just hope, boy, I hope I get through this before I get T-boned? Or do you slow down and evaluate the situation?”
Kim Essendrup · ~8:50 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“Planning ahead lets us potentially plan for that and reduce the probability or the impacts of those risks.”
Kim Essendrup · ~10:20 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“There's a lot of times an idea that if there's a risk, if I just ignore it, it might not happen. If it happens, I'll deal with it.”
Kim Essendrup · ~13:00 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“Instead of saying 'what are the risks?', rephrase it: okay guys, what are the obstacles between us and success? An obstacle has a much more real, almost tangible feel to it.”
Kim Essendrup · ~13:50 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“A risk is an uncertain event. It could be good, could be bad… at the same time you're looking at negative downside threats, you should also be looking at opportunities.”
Kim Essendrup · ~15:10 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“Think of your risk register, an action list, an issues log and a decision log: put that all together in one place, and that's a RAID log. But it's much more than the sum of its parts.”
Kim Essendrup · ~16:40 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“The deep, dark origins of the RAID log, it actually came about in the eighties, in the UK… that contract is a hundred pages long, maybe more. The tool they developed to put the risks, assumptions and dependencies together in a way the delivery team could manage, that was the RAID log.”
Kim Essendrup · ~17:10 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“If you've got a four-week technical project or a massive two-year construction project, you can still get value out of this and scale it according to your needs.”
Kim Essendrup · ~21:20 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“The time and effort invested in risk management has an ROI of 20 to one. It's ridiculous… most organizations do minimal at best, so a little bit of investment really goes a long way.”
Kim Essendrup · ~22:55 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“This is gonna sound ridiculous and obvious, but: use it. And that sounds easy, right? It's not: the RAID log starts to fall down towards the bottom of your priorities.”
Kim Essendrup · ~31:45 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“You can go through a yellow light with your eyes closed and be fine the first time, the second time, the third time. Sooner or later, those project failure statistics are going to catch up with you.”
Kim Essendrup · ~32:25 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“I got distracted, I got focused on other things, then bam, project issues. And the first thing I think of is: am I keeping my RAID log up? And the answer's always no.”
Kim Essendrup · ~32:40 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“As soon as you forget to stay on top of it, it will be on top of you. So it's self-correcting.”
Kim Essendrup · ~33:30 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“If you're on an international project, you're reading the news every day. It could be an earthquake in Turkey, and suddenly you find that affects a project in Australia, and that was a real event.”
Martin Darley · ~38:45 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“A week and a half after they left, the project director came clean: sorry guys, that’s not it: we’re actually a year and a half past your P90. Everybody had egg on their face, because you’re not in the governing dynamics.”
Travis Arlitt · ~57:50 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“It’s like problem solving versus risk management: when the problem is not there, people are not investing in preventative solutions.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~20:40 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“We are extremely underestimating risk management… AI can evaluate all the scenarios simultaneously and calculate the probabilities of the outcome much quicker than what we could do in the past.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:06:10 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Politics is one of the main influencers on these major projects. As project managers we need to understand risk beyond the project level: economic risk, political risk, environmental risk, social risk.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:23:40 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“With risk management, we have some pretty good guidance out there: ISO 31000, we’ve got Project Management Institute, that all kind of lay out this framework of what you should be doing.”
Matt Mitchell · ~2:30 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Risk is probably the one area that I’ve seen more often than not managed, from small to really large enterprises, in Excel.”
Orion Matthews · ~2:05 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Risk management is a key part of the entire life cycle of the project, even up until the point where the project might get canceled. Somebody might pick it up again five years down the road.”
Matt Mitchell · ~4:50 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“We eventually ended up running two different risk registers… The overlap of those kind of muddies the water a little too much for the project team, so we just really wanted to focus on project execution.”
Matt Mitchell · ~8:35 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“It’s public information that they’re selling gas to Egypt, right?… that was one of the things we had to consider as part of all the commercial risk, but that’s not a project execution item.”
Matt Mitchell · ~9:30 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Risk is the effect of uncertainty on our objectives, where that uncertainty is a deviation from what we expected.”
Matt Mitchell · ~10:30 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“It’s most effective to boil those things down into what’s the effect on the schedule, what’s the effect on the cost.”
Matt Mitchell · ~11:20 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“I kind of prefer the COSO perspective because it makes you think, if I come over, 150, can my production handle it? We’re actually seeing some instances where it couldn’t… it flooded the whole system and they had to redesign.”
Matt Mitchell · ~12:45 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“I said, okay, well, if you ordered 100 valves, how many of them would you expect to fail? ‘Probably three.’ Okay, that’s a very low probability of that failure occurring, so we put it in at very low in the risk register.”
Matt Mitchell · ~15:05 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The Latin term is de minimis… it’s so outrageous that we shouldn’t even consider it, because there’s nothing we could do about it if it occurred.”
Matt Mitchell · ~15:55 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“You have to focus on what you can control and what reasonably will impact the project… otherwise we’re gonna waste a lot of money and waste a lot of time thinking about things like planes crashing.”
Matt Mitchell · ~16:10 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The company might have a global risk matrix or a corporate risk matrix, but the project has to have its own.”
Matt Mitchell · ~17:45 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“A big risk on a million-dollar project might be $100,000, but… $100,000 risk on a billion-dollar project has a different frame of reference.”
Matt Mitchell · ~18:15 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“We used the term risk champions… people who kind of understood and had an interest in knowing more about what project risk management looked like, that we could go out and teach them and then let them go do.”
Matt Mitchell · ~19:10 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“It’s hard to do it all as a single individual, and risk management is all about everybody understanding how the whole process works.”
Matt Mitchell · ~20:10 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“One is greater than zero. It’s just about getting in there and doing it. Get in and start a risk register and begin working through what that whole process looks like.”
Matt Mitchell · ~20:50 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The first risk workshop is the hardest, and after that it starts to become a little bit more mechanical, and people know what they’re expected to do.”
Matt Mitchell · ~21:10 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“I’d rather tell you the best way to do it… but I’ll tell you what we did instead.”
Matt Mitchell · ~21:45 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The leader of the entire group said, ‘You guys are here today to tell me why X is our biggest risk.’ Conducted the workshop. Everybody had their input, and X came out as the third-biggest risk from that group.”
Matt Mitchell · ~24:50 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“If you start off the meeting with all those personalities in the room and you got a blank screen and you say, ‘Okay, what are the risks?’ You’re destined to fail.”
Matt Mitchell · ~26:45 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The PMI guidance is that a lesson learned is a future project risk.”
Matt Mitchell · ~27:20 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Don’t delete a risk just because it’s mitigated or it’s no longer applicable, leave it in there and just say that it’s closed out, because somebody’s gonna need to review that sometime in the future.”
Matt Mitchell · ~27:50 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The easiest way to dovetail a risk review in is to kind of piggyback on a cost or schedule review… They’re all related.”
Matt Mitchell · ~29:15 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“It feels like sometimes risk turns into a witch hunt, and people don’t wanna be the one to kick off the hunt, so to speak.”
Orion Matthews · ~30:50 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Yes, we’re finding faults and things, but this is good because we’re gonna prevent it from occurring again.”
Matt Mitchell · ~31:40 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Those do happen, right? It’s the known unknowns versus the unknown unknowns.”
Matt Mitchell · ~32:25 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“They found some ancient jugs on the sea floor… So they had to reroute the pipeline. Those kinds of things happen, and it’s not every day that you’re gonna… find an artifact like that.”
Matt Mitchell · ~33:10 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“We could have a delay… a piece of equipment arriving, but it doesn’t impact the schedule… it doesn’t impact the objectives of the project, so it might not be as big of a risk as it sounds.”
Matt Mitchell · ~33:45 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The company has to make a determination whether they go with that 50% chance number, the P50 as we call it, or something more conservative like a P75.”
Matt Mitchell · ~35:30 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Monte Carlo is most effective on large to very large projects… for smaller projects, we have the PERT method, the Program Evaluation Review Technique.”
Matt Mitchell · ~36:30 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The inputs to a good Monte Carlo are an accurate updated budget or forecast, an accurate and updated schedule, and an accurate and updated risk register.”
Matt Mitchell · ~37:20 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The project manager, project director, they ultimately own all the risks… the risks should be individually owned by the people who are working to mitigate or close them out.”
Matt Mitchell · ~38:30 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“It’s one end of the spectrum or the other. It’s the everything is bad and is going to happen, and you need to put 15 risks in your risk register for me, or none of that’ll never happen, so don’t even put it in there.”
Matt Mitchell · ~42:50 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Having a risk register is infinitely better than not having one at all… somewhere far down the list is the what tool do you use? But the top of the list is create a risk register. That’s it.”
Matt Mitchell · ~44:45 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The project risk register is the simplest form of risk review that exists. It’s very basic, focused on project objectives.”
Matt Mitchell · ~46:20 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Could we get an entire project team to go into a tool and put risks in? No, absolutely not. But having those point contacts, risk champions, people who understood the process out in the field, that was very valuable.”
Matt Mitchell · ~48:20 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The lifecycle of a jet, it’s like 25 years for passenger service, after which it’s only for cargo. That’s a risk mitigation… you have a different perspective on life when you think of it from a risk management aspect.”
Matt Mitchell · ~50:20 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Describe risk in a way that it can be understood by someone who has nothing to do with the project.”
Matt Mitchell · ~57:50 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Not just $10 million. We have to say what that risk is, and it has to be described in a way that is meaningful for outside parties.”
Matt Mitchell · ~58:15 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“A lesson learned is a risk on a future project… even an old risk register is a lessons learned register, right? You’ve captured a number of lessons learned there.”
Matt Mitchell · ~1:01:40 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Project risk management is the simplest form of risk methodologies that exists… the simpler you approach it, the more success you’ll have and the easier it will be to replicate that success over time.”
Matt Mitchell · ~1:03:30 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Settle on a set of definitions, and just know that people will have experienced other terms that meant the same thing.”
Matt Mitchell · ~1:09:25 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
Gates, dashboards, month-end and the numbers leadership actually reads.
“The three I's, in order, are information, insights, and interventions… Intervention is the only thing that matters. That's the only thing that makes money.”
Grant Stead · ~49:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“Now that you told me it's a 0.8, is that good or bad? Unless you tell me what the options are, all of that's useless as a leader.”
Grant Stead · ~50:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“If the people reporting to you aren't reporting in an intervention methodology, you need to start digging, the classic: don't bring me problems, bring me solutions.”
Grant Stead · ~52:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“Every project controls team should have the graphic design under them. I’m just going to say that.”
Jovita Stander · ~22:30 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“I’m an introvert by nature… The nature of project controls is to deal in facts: if you say it’s 54%, it doesn’t mean it’s 52%; it’s 54%.”
Jovita Stander · ~43:45 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“You need to start with the basics. And the basics is cutoff dates, so that everybody reports to the same cutoff date.”
Jovita Stander · ~45:45 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“If something is nagging and you’ve got that gut feeling, even if you can’t put your finger on it, rather go back and check.”
Jovita Stander · ~48:15 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“Is there a golden thread through your weekly reports that feeds into your monthly report? If you deconstruct the month, will it talk to the third week, the second and the first?”
Jovita Stander · ~49:00 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“There are so many moving parts… Project controls is the hub in getting all this information together.”
Jovita Stander · ~53:10 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“They are going to show you what you want to see. They’re not going to show you what the true delay is.”
Tarun Gohel · ~23:00 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“Small resources doesn’t mean you cut a corner… Lower your expectations in the beginning, but make sure the critical expectations are there.”
Tarun Gohel · ~42:20 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“Auditing the process as it develops tells you a lot more about our ability to build these packages than the actual package.”
Geoff Ryan · ~14:50 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“There’s a great project management expression: if you measure it, you manage it, which is project controls 101.”
Geoff Ryan · ~46:20 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“The best set of processes are the ones that are best fit to the particular organization, and the ones that are actually going to be used by your organization.”
Roger Farish · ~17:30 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“Once it gets so much momentum, sometimes it’s just difficult to step away from it, to take a step back and say, okay, let’s take a second look. Let’s bring in an expert that can tell us what is the likelihood that we’ll actually be successful.”
Roger Farish · ~23:00 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“The project manager loves his project, of course, and wants the project to keep going forward, and he’ll do anything and everything to keep moving that project forward… sometimes they’ll find these sort of sneaky ways to do that.”
Roger Farish · ~31:10 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“The independent peer review team will say: thank you for what you’ve done. Now leave us alone. And they will tear it apart.”
Akin Oni · ~24:30 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“For years, project management professionals have been deceived by the triangle. What people call project success is actually project management success.”
Akin Oni · ~45:45 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Project success is project management success plus product success. Of what good is it, ‘the operation was successful’, if the patient is not alive?”
Akin Oni · ~46:50 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Every six weeks we have a retrospective; it’s a more agile framework in this space, especially when you bring everyone’s experience into it.”
Omar Habib · ~39:50 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“If the fancy 4D simulation is not helping your project manager and project director solve their day-to-day issues, it’s not going to be used, same as any report.”
Omar Habib · ~46:40 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“It's not your plan, it's not your schedule, it's not your budget, it is the tool that you use to make sure those plans stay on track, identify when they start to go off track, and course-correct when that starts to happen.”
Kim Essendrup · ~18:20 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“The modern PMO, there are three types: advisory, supporting, and controlling.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~35:20 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“If someone who’s not involved, who doesn’t know my challenges, my risks, comes and tells me this is the way you should be reporting, most probably it’ll fail.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~38:30 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“The client has a single point of contact, a single team responsible for the success of this program. They don’t deal with eight different project management teams and eight different contractors.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~40:50 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“I walked into a team where the delivery team didn’t even know there was going to be a PMO… The PMO is here to support; it’s not the police of the project.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~42:40 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“It typically takes six months to a year to mature your PMO strategy. The first 90 days: learning, identifying gaps, streamlining the processes, and training the team to do it.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~44:20 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“Each project manager was doing their own thing, their own templates, their own way of reporting. From a portfolio perspective, how would I see the entire program budget?”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~54:20 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“So often you see these project-controls reports and you come away with, so what? It's about presenting the information: here are the takeaways, here's what management should do with it. There are decisions to be made.”
Chris Caddell · ~15:05 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“I have this theory that there’s something like quantum physics and general relativity going on in an organization: everything works at this level, but as you try to roll it up, the models break.”
Orion Matthews · ~18:15 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“I don’t know if it’s the Eagle Scout in me or what, but no matter what the incentive is, if I’m not reporting the absolute truth as I can see it to the person in charge of the decisions, I won’t sleep well at night.”
Travis Arlitt · ~56:45 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Reality, it’s there whether you’re acknowledging it or not. And eventually it’s gonna get you. So you are infinitely better acknowledging it early. Not even close to orders of magnitude better, because you can just face it, and everybody gets on the same page.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:03:05 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“When your budget is small, sophisticated procedures and systems may kill your budget. This is not what you necessarily need to apply.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~16:00 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“That review and continuous improvement should take forever. The needs are changing, the market is changing, your projects are changing, your people are changing, so you need to update them continuously.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~19:20 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“The leaders don’t see reliable data. They know something is wrong; they don’t know what it is.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~21:30 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“They were blaming the system. When we started to evaluate, the system was good. They had deactivated a lot of its capacity, and there weren’t any formal procedures for the different contractual models.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~27:45 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“They were so surprised how much more complex the problem was. They thought: we’ll just change the setup in the system and everything will be fine. Normally, that’s not the case.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~29:10 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Engage early, bring people in and let them be a part of that governance creation.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~42:00 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“On paper, project managers should review the costs and invoices. On a major project they cannot review everything; they become a bottleneck. So they delegate their responsibilities, deliberately.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~47:00 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“It’s an improving method; it’s not finalized, and I’m learning from others along the way. I don’t think I know everything.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:00:45 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“We would update the Monte Carlo every month, but we would only present it every quarter.”
Matt Mitchell · ~37:50 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The idea is very simple. It’s really about moving an idea from the early thinking into the execution whilst reducing the uncertainty, the unknown that exists in a project.”
Iwona Wilson · ~4:20 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“During the gate the leadership would pause and would ask the question: ‘Given all we know about the opportunity, do we still want to continue investing in this project?’”
Iwona Wilson · ~5:00 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Stage gate is seen as a governance tool, and it is a governance tool. But for me, it’s really more a decision-making system, and also it’s a way of thinking.”
Iwona Wilson · ~8:15 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Projects might pass gates, and might still carry political bias, or hidden assumptions, and might still pass the gate with stakeholders being misaligned, if the focus is so much about passing the gate as opposed to improving decision-making during the gate.”
Iwona Wilson · ~12:10 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“A good governance should improve the quality of your decisions. It’s not just about generating more documents.”
Iwona Wilson · ~14:40 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“The only reason we have phases is to prepare you for the next decision you need to make. The only reason you’re asked to produce deliverables is to enable some kind of decision.”
Iwona Wilson · ~19:50 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“A lot of projects often get stuck, and they produce deliverables after deliverables without pausing to ask: what is the decision that we actually need to make?”
Iwona Wilson · ~20:10 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“At every decision gate an organization is making two decisions. Are we ready to proceed, and do we want to proceed?”
Iwona Wilson · ~28:15 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Is everything super polished? Do people ask questions? Do they challenge assumptions? Or do they just accept everything without any challenge?”
Iwona Wilson · ~41:20 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Run a little bit of a lessons learned workshop to understand what are some of the patterns running through your organization.”
Iwona Wilson · ~37:15 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Those warning signs might lead to a false confidence about the project.”
Iwona Wilson · ~43:00 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Decision-making is not just at these gates. It’s actually something that needs to be inculcated into the entire organization somehow… that really is the prize.”
Orion Matthews · ~1:07:00 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Having a process in place is not the same of us having capabilities. So that’s the biggest misconception in this industry.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:33:20 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Many companies ask about stage gate process usually after something major happens, after a major overrun, or some big public issue, or investor pressure or community pressure, or change of leadership.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:34:40 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“That’s usually when they begin to see there is a difference between having an approval system and having a decision-making system.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:35:10 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“The conversation on the project team, rather than how can we improve decision quality, it’s all about how can we pass the gate.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:38:10 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“People begin to lose trust in the process, they detach, and they produce documents to ensure compliance as opposed to create clarity.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:38:30 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“The most expensive meeting is the one where everyone agrees.”
Orion Matthews · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
“What's the most expensive lie?”
Orion Matthews · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
Leading crews, teams and organizations when the stakes run to ten figures.
“Culture is cadence… If I can't effectively tell 400 welders on day one where to go put their stick, boom, you just blew up the whole turnaround.”
Grant Stead · ~7:20 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“These people are there to work. If you can't tell 'em what to do, they're gonna find something to do, and that is where the culture goes awry.”
Grant Stead · ~9:15 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“It's the owner's circus, and it's the owner's job to ask for this many lions, this many tigers, this many bears.”
Grant Stead · ~34:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“Standing in the boardroom, it was a sea of men in front of me… This really was the first time in my life that there was no other female in the boardroom.”
Jovita Stander · ~33:00 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“I had an option to assert my authority… or I could do it in a more subtle way. If you do it in a more pleasant way, you gain more in the long run.”
Jovita Stander · ~34:40 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“I would always be the last one going home. I would never leave before them and the work was finished.”
Jovita Stander · ~36:10 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“The wife and the kids are at home… so you also need to take that human element into consideration: a lot of things might be happening that are not apparent.”
Jovita Stander · ~37:20 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“Recognizing good work and giving credit where it’s due… I think that buys you as a leader a lot of miles.”
Jovita Stander · ~38:20 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“Women have a different way of leadership, of addressing problems… It’s not that how the men do it is right or wrong, or how we do it is right or wrong, it’s just different.”
Jovita Stander · ~1:05:00 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“They call it riding the bull: you’re trying to stay on the bull and keep the project on track for just eight seconds… People fall off all the time, and people always ask: why did you fall off the bull? Eight seconds, it’s not that long. Can’t you get this done?”
James Wiseman · ~4:20 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“There’s no big red easy button that you can push that says: execute project.”
James Wiseman · ~5:35 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Projects are built by people, a hundred percent. They don’t build themselves.”
James Wiseman · ~42:50 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“The project manager is almost like a coach at this point: if you’ve got a really good team, you’re just helping them drive toward the goal line.”
James Wiseman · ~43:10 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“People would never do projects if they weren’t optimists… when people work together as a team, there’s really nothing they can’t do.”
James Wiseman · ~46:00 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“You want everybody, that’s worked on the project, that’s benefiting from it, that lives nearby, to be proud of that thing you did. That is your hallmark of success.”
James Wiseman · ~50:50 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“If they see a way of doing things that they think is dumb, they’ll just wanna do it a better way… Set out the objective and the goal, and people are just incredible at finding really cool ways to do things.”
James Wiseman · ~1:00:00 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“I raised a couple of teenagers, so I often think of this as: I’m the parent in the room as the project manager, and I’m trying to get these teenagers to play nice with each other.”
Geoff Ryan · ~8:20 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“There has to be one person whose only interest is the project itself: you are the project advocate… able to say the things you could never say if your incentives aren’t aligned properly.”
Orion Matthews · ~38:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“Uber was a rupture… we will have ruptures in our project management world, and I’m hoping AWP will be part of that.”
Geoff Ryan · ~52:30 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“We’re not consultants, we’re project managers.”
Geoff Ryan · ~1:08:50 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“You need buy-in from executives, from different layers of management… because of company culture, you can’t just go from one side of the coin to the other.”
Roger Farish · ~17:50 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“Projects are built by people, not spreadsheets. Trust, alignment and clarity are worth more than any contract.”
Akin Oni · ~7:55 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Build teams that tell the truth faster than problems grow.”
Akin Oni · ~8:20 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“A mega project is a marathon with sprints inside it. Pace yourself.”
Akin Oni · ~8:30 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Listen. Learn. Lead, in that order. Most leaders who fail start in the reverse order.”
Akin Oni · ~10:20 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“I’m one of the field guys that translates strategy to operational realities through projects. That’s why I call myself a change agent.”
Akin Oni · ~17:10 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“A project can look very complex. What I do is bring simplicity to the chaos.”
Akin Oni · ~34:30 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“We don’t work keeping our tricks of the trade close to our chest.”
Akin Oni · ~1:22:50 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“People don’t realize the value of it in the beginning: it’s an add-on, not something essential. So you keep going until you’re stuck.”
Omar Habib · ~41:30 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“We have to be the ones that say the truth about the project and bring some of these potentially uncomfortable conversations to the surface.”
Kim Essendrup · ~11:20 · ep 010 with Kim Essendrup
“I wouldn’t just dictate my terms and then ask why you failed. My role is to set clear expectations: we have deliverables. If you can do it from anywhere, good.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~21:30 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“I don’t see a problem out of transparency. It is what it is. It happened; we need to figure it out. I’m not a complainer; I’m results-driven.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~58:30 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“If someone makes a mistake and they will get fired, if that’s your approach, no one will be transparent with you. We’re not here to police, we’re here to help. Mistakes happen.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~1:00:00 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“You've gotta be able to influence people… it's the soft skills you've gotta learn, and it's difficult for cost engineers. We're not wired that way.”
Martin Darley · ~14:45 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“Being willing to make a recommendation, that's the key. A lot of our peers are sometimes unwilling to put themselves out there… That's really what we need to aspire to.”
Michael Nosbisch · ~15:40 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“If you wanna sit in this chair one day, really all you have to do is show an interest and be willing to give some time. What you'll get out of it is so much more than what you have to put into it.”
Chris Caddell · ~47:15 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“You learn skills you can take back to the workplace: servant leadership, influence. Everyone's a volunteer, everyone's got an opinion… when you're the president, that's the email that gets all the opinions.”
Martin Darley · ~47:45 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“He was inviting us to pay attention to the bigger picture, to the giga picture: the machinery layout, the relationships between different functions, even the personality types he selected for leading each area.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~7:30 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“I don’t think I am different; everybody is unique. Our background, our culture, our family, the way we’ve been educated, that’s how differently we see things.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~6:00 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Blaming others is always the simplest way. Blaming ourselves is the most difficult.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~24:55 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Something I underestimated as an engineer in the past and overestimate today: a big portion of our decisions are being made emotionally rather than logically.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~30:00 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“In oil and gas EPC we were spending lots of money on team building. On infrastructure joint ventures I see less investment in this area. In my opinion, it is essential, essential.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~39:10 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Don’t apologize, and never thank me for the job I’m here to do. I’m here to solve the problems that you alone couldn’t solve, and support you to achieve what you are supposed to achieve.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:08:50 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Be brave to admit my own mistakes, take the blame on behalf of the team, and share the wins with the team, introduce the team as the main winner. There is no leader who can deliver anything big alone.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:10:10 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“If I want to grow, my team should grow, and then we can deliver much more complex, more difficult projects successfully, and learn from each other.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:09:50 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“I’m a dreamer. I like big visions, and a lot of people find them very unrealistic. So I work with detail-oriented team members and ask them to review my work, because I know they are brutal in criticizing it.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:12:10 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“I lost my father during a project, and my counterpart in our joint venture never said anything… that human-level touch actually connects us together.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:13:30 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“I was totally against psychology as an engineer: everything should be two plus two. Then I worked with an executive coach, and it was very eye-opening: to understand human beings, to understand our differences.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:14:30 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Not to assume that whatever I see, everybody else sees, because they see different things that I don’t see.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:15:40 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Systems thinking, more than anything else, is a mindset: how to be open to contradictory information, rather than being affected by one specific methodology or one specific media.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:22:50 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“You can’t think in systems if you can’t see a little bit from other people’s perspective.”
Orion Matthews · ~1:26:40 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Do not expect us to jump into the chaos with you. If we jump in the chaos with you, we become part of the problem you were trying to solve, instead of being the solution.”
Christina Robinson · ~8:15 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“They bleed if I cut them? All right then, they’re just human, just like me. They just have a title, that’s all.”
Christina Robinson · ~23:05 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“We do humans first. People forget that the people we bring on board to these projects are actually humans, not robots and computers.”
Christina Robinson · ~30:45 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“You have a virus, and if you do not get rid of that virus, it’s going to infiltrate the entire program. And sure enough, exactly what I said happened: people just started dropping like flies off the project.”
Christina Robinson · ~42:25 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“Project controls needs a seat at the leadership table: we’re the ones helping you navigate your projects… If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re just another body that can be replaced with AI or some type of automation.”
Christina Robinson · ~1:04:30 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“A lesson learned review is not a finger-pointing session, and so everything is on the table.”
Matt Mitchell · ~31:15 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Give them the homework to go look at past projects and lessons learned… certainly develop those relationships as early as possible.”
Matt Mitchell · ~56:45 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“It’s the owner that has responsibility to set a project for success, because the owner focus is always long-term.”
Iwona Wilson · ~17:00 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“You might understand the trade-offs. You might understand where the information comes from. But if there’s no commitment, nothing happens.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:04:00 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Some people would even say that your success is only one decision away.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:44:20 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Create that excitement for what it is that you’re trying to achieve. Be very clear on intention… But at the same time, detach. If it’s not the right time, don’t get upset about it.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:24:40 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“you cannot outsource accountability”
Omer Iqbal · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
Telling the story of the project: up, down and across the table.
“One picture is more valuable than a thousand words, I suppose.”
Jovita Stander · ~24:05 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“You can never be prepared enough. Prepare.”
Jovita Stander · ~39:30 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“It takes a lot of courage to not weave and bob when you don’t know the answer… being able to tell people what they don’t want to hear is a real skill.”
Orion Matthews · ~42:50 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“There’s intrinsic value in having the local people involved and invested in the success of the project.”
James Wiseman · ~40:20 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“If something’s going wrong, do you want me to text you, call you, email you? … You wanna communicate the way people like to communicate.”
James Wiseman · ~43:30 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Don't do death by PowerPoint. Really just succinct: when this happens, this problem is created. If we change this to this, it will solve that problem, and your metrics will look like this.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~35:20 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“I went to one presentation and I completely bombed it… I delivered straightaway whatever I had to deliver, without thinking what the context was, what the culture was.”
Tarun Gohel · ~32:50 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“Keep the mindset that you’re going to present to somebody walking on the street who has no clue what the project is. It’s like explaining to your mama what the project is.”
Tarun Gohel · ~33:45 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“It’s not about what you are going to deliver, it’s about how you’re going to make people feel about it.”
Tarun Gohel · ~37:30 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“Tell the story, make a point. Tell the story, make a point… People will remember the story.”
Tarun Gohel · ~38:50 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“Advanced work packaging is an example of collaboration in the industry, and I promise you, we all have the same problems. Collectively we know the answers, but individually we don’t.”
Geoff Ryan · ~47:40 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“The videos are our gift to them… because basically you need to convince somebody else to try this. Here’s the evidence.”
Geoff Ryan · ~1:13:40 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“You need to know to go straight to them and say: thank you, Mr. Project Manager, but I also want to hear from so-and-so.”
Roger Farish · ~33:30 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“The folks who are not part of the task force are usually the ones that will give me the answers that are somewhat different from what the project team knows… I find usually a lot of gaps there.”
Roger Farish · ~34:20 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“Tell them the destination, tell them why it matters, and tell them what you need from them.”
Akin Oni · ~52:20 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Sometimes the 4D report is all about organizing the information so your client understands it.”
Omar Habib · ~19:30 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“You bring everyone to a movie… you have construction experience, so when you look at it, you don’t just express your feeling, you express your experience. Now we all speak the same language.”
Omar Habib · ~27:40 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“One picture equals a thousand words. I don’t need to send you a hundred pages to tell you the project is late: you look at the 4D simulation and you see it.”
Omar Habib · ~30:20 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“I took third place, and it was a really sobering moment for me as a young engineer… form over function matters.”
Orion Matthews · ~59:50 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“I hear this more frequently: ‘I understand the calculation, I really like it, but it doesn’t tell me the story.’ So now what I’m doing is 30–40% analysis and 60% how we’re going to tell the story.”
Omar Habib · ~1:01:40 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“The other buy-in, if you don’t have it, don’t even try, is the client buy-in… you’re getting resistance from the team and the client is not backing you up, so you’re set up for failure.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~43:40 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“We have to always be transparent with the client, even if it’s a risk that will get the project sideways… Don’t hide it under the rug.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~56:30 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“Some clients: ‘Why are you telling me this? We will know later, in six months.’ I’m telling you because you are the one liable for the entire program.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~57:50 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“You also have to present the results of the analysis, not be shy about it, really come across as being an expert and being recognized as a member of the team.”
Michael Nosbisch · ~12:55 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“Push back on the misnomer that engineers and technical people can't communicate… learning that skill, practicing that skill and getting feedback on that skill is as important as any other skill.”
Michael Bennink · ~16:40 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“The more people we meet in different places, the more we realize we're all sort of the same.”
Michael Bennink · ~36:15 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“One of my favorite experiences is being stuck in a trailer on a Greek island, working for an Italian contractor, with a project team half from Spain and half from Finland… all the different cultures in the end have the same goal, but can't agree on what to order for lunch.”
Michael Bennink · ~41:35 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“The truth is rarely in the middle; it’s always lying at the extremes. You do your detailed work for the people that really need it, and then you translate it. It’s not a rolling up or down.”
Travis Arlitt · ~21:00 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“They would’ve made that decision eventually… but when you see it, the urgency gets amped up tenfold. It’s your job as a planner to have an uncomfortable conversation with that one guy or gal in the chain of command that needs to pull a lever, and needs to pull it fast.”
Travis Arlitt · ~37:15 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“If you have the ear of the decision maker and you have the data, dabble in this redistribution off to the side and show them a different view. It shakes people into action.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:19:55 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“My business partner coached me: Travis, you don’t need to be against this stuff. You need to be for the truth and the redistribution.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:33:30 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“If they don’t understand it, they will not follow it. If they don’t find it effective for their specific work, they don’t follow it.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~11:00 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Stay curious. If your client, your team, the leadership don’t see the same problem as you, they will not buy it. They will not spend money on it. They will not allocate the resources for it.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~32:20 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“In more political organizations, people are not interested in sharing their real ideas in workshops. In private, they may share something confidential, so private interviews should be a part of any contract.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~33:00 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Sometimes you need to change your strategy at the moment you’re presenting: you may pass a few slides you worked so hard on, because you don’t observe interest among the audience.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~36:20 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Ultimately they are the decision makers; we cannot decide on behalf of our clients. Stay flexible and curious: OK, this is not possible, what else is possible that still addresses the objective?”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~37:15 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“We have become very polarized… read totally contradictory opinions. It’s important to hear them, because your client might have the same perspective, and you need to understand that concern.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:25:40 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“That’s half the role, is being able to kind of manage those personalities… It’s a lot of personality management, especially initially.”
Matt Mitchell · ~22:20 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Not only do you have to manage the loud personalities, but you have to coach the quiet ones as well… the term they use is elicit risk.”
Matt Mitchell · ~23:15 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“My favorite icebreaker is, you show up for a first meeting and say, ‘I’m from corporate. I’m here to help.’ And you always get a bunch of laughter.”
Matt Mitchell · ~41:10 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“They’re not in the ISO docs, and there’s not a lot of very specific guidance in those frameworks… just get started, get going. It gets easier as you go.”
Matt Mitchell · ~42:15 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“You have to kinda talk them off the ledge… it’s not just about you, it’s about future projects.”
Matt Mitchell · ~43:10 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“If all of a sudden someone mentions a stakeholder that hasn’t been mentioned earlier on, then you might know that probably stakeholder engagement have been done too late.”
Iwona Wilson · ~42:10 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“If you bring a bunch of people together, people are usually not on their best behavior. They tend to protect their own interests.”
Iwona Wilson · ~44:50 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“They often self-censor themselves… because the culture of the organization is, ‘Let’s keep it going. Let’s move on.’”
Iwona Wilson · ~45:30 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“And that’s why strategy meetings often take three months. If they could actually take one day or two days.”
Iwona Wilson · ~47:20 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Those teams that are able early on to go through those difficult conversations, the conflicts, those teams tend to execute faster with less surprises.”
Iwona Wilson · ~47:50 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“We take Post-it notes, me and my husband. We don’t sit opposite to each other. In fact, we don’t even look at each other, and we quietly write down what are some of the issues, questions, and concerns.”
Iwona Wilson · ~51:30 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“We’re trying to get our thoughts out of our heads and make them visible on the wall.”
Iwona Wilson · ~52:15 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“If people don’t feel like they can contribute, they begin to disengage. They lose the trust in the process, and then they often leave.”
Iwona Wilson · ~55:40 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“If people down on the ground are not invited to express their opinions, that is gonna impact decision-making. That is gonna often show up later on as a surprise that could have been prevented.”
Iwona Wilson · ~58:40 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Who are the key stakeholders that need to be involved? What amount of commitment is required to make that decision stick?”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:05:50 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“You need to aim to create some sort of language fluency across different functions, so we all speak from the same hymn sheet, and a framework for decision-making that people trust.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:08:10 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“What I learned is that being right, or doing everything by the book, was not enough… If you're progressing on a project or a task, engage the stakeholders early. Walk them through. Identify their challenges. Build alignment with senior stakeholders as well as junior stakeholders.”
Omer Iqbal · ~5:00 · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
“Organisations are sometimes a popularity contest as well: you need to build that rapport, that presence, that vibe… You become that infectious, happy person, and then you spread it out. Engage with people, bring them on the journey.”
Omer Iqbal · ~6:00 · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
“Happy to work together, happy to explore together, and happy to remain curious together.”
Omer Iqbal · ~10:30 · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
Logic, float, cadence and the plans that hold thousands of people in sync.
“For a turnaround on that scale, you're gonna have anywhere between 70 and 100 thousand activities in a schedule.”
Grant Stead · ~9:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“The turnaround manager will call another turnaround manager, Citgo to Valero, and say: hey, I'm gonna pull mine up a week, you move yours back a week.”
Grant Stead · ~29:15 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“There were periods where the schedule demanded 80-plus welders and they had 20, and periods where it needed 20 and they had 80. We had a plan and we had resources committed, but nobody ever looked at them together.”
Grant Stead · ~36:45 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“The field is in the details; they live in the details, because they have to do it. So build your schedule to match the field execution.”
Grant Stead · ~44:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“In a turnaround, I need P6 to move those little Tetris pieces exactly where they need to go… I need to move them where they fit, like grains of sand.”
Grant Stead · ~45:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“You can’t dig up the whole city for the network; it’ll just be one big chaos… We don’t talk about phases; we talk about priorities.”
Jovita Stander · ~19:50 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“Each of those little assets had a code, and those codes would tie back into P6… so we could always relate back; it doesn’t matter which database you were using.”
Jovita Stander · ~27:30 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“I just think of it as a stream of activities now… the engineering phase needs to be sequenced to order materials and keep materials flowing into the project.”
James Wiseman · ~7:55 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“You, as an owner’s project-controls professional, have a responsibility to go and find out the truth, what is the real delay, so it doesn’t happen that one month there is zero delay and the next month, six months.”
Tarun Gohel · ~24:00 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“The contractor’s schedule always comes with a constraint on the finish date: the date won’t move… If you ask for their P10, P50, P90 dates, they will never give it to you.”
Tarun Gohel · ~23:30 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“After two, three months of brainstorming, the true delay comes, and the contractor says: okay, we are not delayed by three months, we are only delayed by two. We’re happy to show two months in our report.”
Tarun Gohel · ~25:10 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“Today the reality is: it’s a choice. You have the choice to finish on time and on budget.”
Geoff Ryan · ~19:10 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“If you come in late or you overspend the budget, you had the choice to go there, and you chose not to.”
Geoff Ryan · ~53:10 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“You can buy a schedule, but you can’t buy it with money. You’ve gotta buy it with effort and time and process.”
Geoff Ryan · ~1:03:30 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“Think about building a Lego house. How many days does it take you? That’s the time dimension, 4D. How much does it cost? That’s 5D. Simulate them together and you’ve got both.”
Omar Habib · ~11:30 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“If you link the schedule and the model but you can’t tell the project owner about resources and what-if scenarios, it’s not really 4D, it’s just a cartoon kind of simulation.”
Omar Habib · ~17:50 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“The team sits together, we call it the war room, and we do what-if scenarios on the spot: what if we added two crews to this zone?”
Omar Habib · ~29:40 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“Let’s say I just inherited a mess. We’re off schedule, we’re off budget… you talked about this amazing world. We’re not there. We’re not even close. Is it too late? Do I even try?”
Orion Matthews · ~40:30 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“From the 18th of August to the 1st of September, two weeks, we addressed the critical issue and simulated it… Now we are back on track in regards to visibility, communication and coordination.”
Omar Habib · ~42:45 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“You need a schedule, but you need to understand your audience for that schedule. If you don’t have that underlying progress picture, that’s what really gets the leadership engaged.”
Travis Arlitt · ~10:50 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“You’re not looking at a plan variance. The plan is now a date and a set of progress that’s required to meet that date. And if your average pace is less than what’s required, then you’re pushing a bow wave. You have schedule compression.”
Travis Arlitt · ~12:35 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“If you’re gonna do a probabilistic or a schedule quality score, eh, you may not have the jet.”
Travis Arlitt · ~13:30 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“It’s not linear. If you have a fixed end date, every period that goes by you have fewer periods to spread it by and more volume. If you’re not on top of that, it’s gonna build under you, and then it’s a two or three x bow wave.”
Travis Arlitt · ~16:55 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Rolling up a level five all the way to the level one and back down has never worked that great for me. Level three, to me, is almost a no-man’s-land.”
Travis Arlitt · ~19:45 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. What really is happening under the surface of that plan?”
Travis Arlitt · ~22:25 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Going backwards to the plan can be lagging. It doesn’t drive urgency, it doesn’t drive action… If you’re doing a go-forward redistribution, I’d expect you’re gaining minimum three months, probably six to nine months, on those key decisions.”
Travis Arlitt · ~24:35 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“I always look at the schedule, but the governing dynamics of all that logic is the progress picture. You gotta get under and into that progress picture if you’re gonna get ahead of those tough decisions.”
Travis Arlitt · ~26:45 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“I’ve been the guy behind the box, and I can make that schedule tell you whatever you want it to. Generally, if I’m with a contractor, I’m gonna make it suit the contract.”
Travis Arlitt · ~54:15 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Unless there’s a regime change, which happens all the time, that’s your window to really pop in some realism, because they want it.”
Travis Arlitt · ~55:35 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Nobody’s ever said: hey Travis, put this schedule together and tell me when we’re gonna finish this job. It’s always: we’re gonna finish this job at this point, and you’re building the plan around that.”
Travis Arlitt · ~58:45 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Early starts matter. Because what happens if you miss those starts: you start to get that compression.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:17:30 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“If you have an activity and you have a 50% chance of finishing on a day, and there’s a dependent activity that you have a 50% chance of finishing on time, you only have a 25% chance of meeting that schedule.”
Matt Mitchell · ~34:40 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Always analyze inputs into your cost or your schedule with a little bit of skepticism, and ask questions.”
Matt Mitchell · ~59:20 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
The paper trail: records, revisions and the systems that keep the truth findable.
“The welders in the field look at an isometric drawing. That's what they do… and the tools to help them manage that are almost non-existent.”
Grant Stead · ~1:01:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“There are 64,000 documents that make up that billion-dollar facility, mislabeled, misorganized… it's horrendous.”
Grant Stead · ~1:05:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“We found one drawing where all six pages were just page one, six times. Come to find out, those spools were never sent to fab, and everybody's saying, 'we've got all the piping we need for that circuit.'”
Grant Stead · ~1:08:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“I eventually found my niche as someone who could implement doc control programs, from both a system and a program perspective, and set up the maintenance of both once the software was implemented.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~2:30 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Doc control, when it's done correctly, is to make sure that the most updated information is easily accessible by the correct audience at any moment, from an agreed-upon single source of truth. Simply stated, but maybe not so easy to achieve.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~4:05 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Multiply this by the thousands of other engineering documents, and the decades, or even centuries, that a field is operated… you have innumerable versions of this document to monitor and track.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~5:30 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“An admin already has a full-time job… this task is really best left to specialized doc controllers that understand the lifecycle and how to manage it.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~6:10 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Where I've seen it be most effective in a project structure is to have it sit under project services, reporting directly to the project services manager.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~7:05 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“It really comes down to what has to have revision control. Meeting minutes don't: they're static content that happened on a static date, and they can reside on a SharePoint or a shared drive with minimal risk.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~9:55 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“We call this the ready-fire-aim approach: you're creating the structure for your program and simultaneously managing a lot of documents, under a time crunch… It introduces risk, and in the end it costs way more than if you would have introduced it early on.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~11:40 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Doc control should really be part of the pre-planning stages: it allows your document controllers to understand what documents will be managed, and to put the proper processes and systems in place prior to the deluge that will inevitably follow.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~11:05 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“You can leverage the power of your system to automate these processes as much as possible. And all the while, this is very important, you write them down in a procedure and you train your users.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~14:20 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“I think it was you who actually said, the tool is only as good as the discipline of its operators. And that's very true. That's why I emphasize the procedure.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~15:50 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“This is the agreed-upon playbook. This is what ensures that we're all singing from the same sheet of music.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~16:15 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“I'm not making up these rules because I don't have anything better to do and I want to ruin your day… We're on the same team. Let's work together.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~18:20 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Document control has a direct effect on all of it (cost, schedule, quality, risk), and the consequences can be highly visible when the practices aren't followed.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~20:25 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Doc control really delivers your return on investment, even though it may not be immediately obvious to you.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~21:45 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“It can expand and contract depending on the phase that you are in.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~25:10 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“If you've got good document control, you don't hear a lot of noise… The more noise you have, the more it is an indicator that document control is not going in a great direction.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~26:50 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Verify that everyone's pulling from the agreed-upon single source of truth, and not from an outdated folder they have squirreled away on their C drive.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~29:40 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“You need to couple the principle of least privilege with a principle of speedy access… what I see a lot of orgs do is they're great at locking things down, and then they get worse at granting access.”
Orion Matthews · ~29:55 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Make your security permissions as nimble and dynamic as your workforce.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~30:35 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Work process flows… have proved invaluable for helping management understand what the people in document control are doing, why you have as many people as you do, and how things are getting done.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~33:30 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Sometimes I feel like a forensic scientist on some of the projects I've worked on, finding out how something happened.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~37:40 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“It's imperative if you want things to run smoothly and efficiently; otherwise you're gonna get noise.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~38:30 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Any automation that I can leverage will put me in a better position than having to do everything manually.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~41:15 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“It was feasible at the beginning of the project, when you had less than 200 documents, but it quickly grew out of control… we didn't have data standardization or integrity, document numbers that were inconsistent. That really bit us.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~42:30 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“It's funny. I find a lot of naming conventions are based on the inadequacies of a system.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~43:55 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“In order to drive to the correct technology, you really need to be able to understand your processes, and how to make these tools work for you.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~52:20 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Sometimes somebody figuratively backs up a dump truck and gives you a thousand documents in one submission. Something that I have found, besides pizza, that gets me through these times: checklists.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~58:45 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“For four hours of the day, these resources will be devoted specifically to this heads-down work, and there will be one person designated for answering ad-hoc questions or dealing with things that need to be escalated.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~1:00:40 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“These projects are decades in the making in some cases. And you have people on and off, and on and off, and a lot of knowledge gaps here and there.”
Matt Mitchell · ~3:45 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“The capturing of that information and the risks that we considered and the reasons why we made certain decisions that we made, those should be documented, and documented well. And risk management is one of the best ways to do that.”
Matt Mitchell · ~4:10 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
Named books, bodies of knowledge, standards and the people worth studying.
“Humans are very bad at estimating how much they need a checklist. There's a reason that pilots who have 20,000 hours of experience flying planes go through a checklist.”
Orion Matthews · ~1:02:20 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“Unless you know how to manage your own money, how can you expect to manage somebody else’s money? So I read a lot of finance books.”
Tarun Gohel · ~50:55 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“It connects spirituality with leadership… It talks a lot about understanding yourself before even doing anything, a balance between inner peace and outer success.”
Tarun Gohel · ~49:40 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“We weren’t trying to create an answer. We wanted to capture best practices; we had to have examples of where people were doing this and being successful.”
Geoff Ryan · ~3:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“They read the book and they’re like: yeah, I didn’t learn anything, but I have a holistic understanding of how things fit with each other. Which is really what we’re trying to achieve.”
Geoff Ryan · ~1:04:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“You don’t just Google-translate this type of concept. You have to understand it.”
Geoff Ryan · ~1:05:20 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“CII has conducted research to demonstrate that a lower [PDRI] score ultimately yields better project performance, both in terms of cost and schedule.”
Roger Farish · ~28:40 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“The recommended practices from AACE I use on more or less a daily basis… they’re a little bit of the backbone of what we do.”
Roger Farish · ~56:00 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“Even though it’s called Capital Projects, that book is all about the front-end planning of projects… It’s geared towards executives, but I think it’s still very accessible to anybody interested in capital projects. I definitely highly recommend it.”
Roger Farish · ~57:10 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“My goal in writing all these books: when can we stop mega-project failures?”
Akin Oni · ~1:20:20 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“I was a big fan of Eric Wing. I met him twice. Really top-class people to learn from.”
Omar Habib · ~1:17:40 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“AACE's standards and recommended practices are global… embedded in everything the oil companies and EPCs do. If people aren't aware of it, they're still doing it.”
Martin Darley · ~37:45 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“Jeff Bezos said when you get into a day-two mentality, it leads to stasis, it leads to death: you always have to keep a day-one mentality. And I thought: that’s exactly what we’re doing. Every status state is a fresh day one.”
Travis Arlitt · ~25:35 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Hopefully I’m not a Peter Keating, and I wish I was more of a Howard Roark… when you read that, you get inspired to take a little more boldness and unique ideas.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:32:00 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“I’m a little more Howard Roark. I’m not a joiner.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:34:20 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Get that free app, look at some examples, and convert one of your own charts into that forward-redistribution view in 30 minutes or so.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:35:10 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“PMI has OPM3, PRINCE2 has one, there’s P3M3, but many of these methodologies focus on a specific area. They are not covering the integration: vertical, horizontal and cross-functional.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~59:00 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“It talks about some of the early philosophers and how they loved to gamble because they understood what the odds were… It’s a fascinating book.”
Matt Mitchell · ~50:45 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Decision quality is a standalone discipline that is measuring the quality of decisions based on the information you have available at the given time, regardless of the outcomes the decision is going to lead to.”
Iwona Wilson · ~20:40 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“He calls it the groan zone. It gets messy. People feel the disagreement, discomfort. And a lot of leaders don’t like sitting in that place, so they say, ‘Well, let’s stop. Let’s schedule the next meeting for next week.’”
Iwona Wilson · ~46:40 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“A lot of people listen to those dimensions and they say, ‘Iwona, this is such common sense.’ … The biggest challenge is if the common sense isn’t applied early enough.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:02:20 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“So the quality of decision is as good as the weakest.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:03:50 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“It helps you align what excites you with real-life job titles; it's how I ended up in board roles.”
Omer Iqbal · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
“All of his books are good; he's tapping into some real good case studies.”
Omer Iqbal · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
The early phase where projects are actually won or lost.
“How do you scale? You just need to have good plans and good people, that’s my first principles.”
James Wiseman · ~12:00 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“We’d have a path-of-construction workshop, and we say to the construction team: imagine construction in heaven. What does that look like?”
Geoff Ryan · ~10:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“You look back at all the projects you’ve done, and you see where you’ve had the ability to influence the project the most, and it’s always at the front end. The decisions made during that development phase really shape the project, and can sometimes make or break a project.”
Roger Farish · ~8:30 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“If you do everything right in the front end, it’s not a guarantee that your project is going to be successful; you still have to execute. But it gives you that much higher likelihood. Exponentially higher. And conversely, if you skip some steps or go through it too hurriedly, the likelihood of being successful is exponentially lower.”
Roger Farish · ~9:00 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“The whole idea is that organizations are taking a disciplined and structured approach to making those decisions, so that they’re making the best possible decision on how to invest their capital.”
Roger Farish · ~12:10 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“At the end of a stage you have a gate review… an economic analysis, a checklist of the things required, a request of funds to continue, and a recommendation: should the project continue, go on hold, or recycle? There are exit ramps for different projects.”
Roger Farish · ~11:30 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“The less you’re spending, the earlier in the project, the higher outcome of success, kind of like dialing in a cannonball before you shoot it. You want to make sure the aim is correct before you apply all the force: energy, money…”
Orion Matthews · ~61:10 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“The earlier we get in touch, usually the better… as we get involved, we typically get more and more involved, which is very satisfying, as we find ways to help owners and clients support their development of projects.”
Roger Farish · ~58:20 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“Poor front-end loading is the root of most disasters that we experience on mega projects.”
Akin Oni · ~6:15 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“The question isn’t ‘Can we build it?’ The question is, ‘Should we build it, now, here, with these assumptions, and at this risk?’”
Akin Oni · ~19:20 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“Evaluation is where courage meets clarity, where companies choose discipline over ambition.”
Akin Oni · ~19:45 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“If the story isn’t convincing on its own, the project shouldn’t proceed.”
Akin Oni · ~20:20 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“It’s always flexible at the beginning, and it gets harder as you dive more into the project. Do your due diligence during the planning phase.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~12:10 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“What’s the minimum amount of work that we need to do to answer the main question at gate one? It’s not about doing all possible deliverables that we’ve ever done in our life.”
Iwona Wilson · ~25:15 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“All decisions are equally important, but not all decisions have the same consequences.”
Iwona Wilson · ~32:15 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“If they are not answered consciously, they’re answered unconsciously, through assumptions.”
Iwona Wilson · ~32:25 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Many projects are already lost or won before that decision, and it’s really about how they treat those early decisions.”
Iwona Wilson · ~32:40 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“An opportunity framing workshop can be really messy, and can be painful, and they can be uncomfortable. But this is the cost of alignment.”
Iwona Wilson · ~49:00 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Opportunity framing is still one of the best-kept secrets in the oil and gas industry.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:38:50 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“They assume alignment. They don’t test the alignment. They call assumptions givens. They don’t challenge them.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:39:50 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Move from developing faster to developing smarter. That’s where the opportunity is.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:43:00 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“This is what I love the most about opportunity framing, where people see there is a distinction between a given and an assumption.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:11:20 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
Boots-on-the-ground reality: installed quantities, progressing and what the field really sees.
“If you've got 5,000 people working at a 0.8 productivity factor, that's 20 percent: a thousand of those people could have stayed home… They could have been fixing every pothole in Toledo.”
Grant Stead · ~34:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“It’s all about the workers and the foreman. If we can give them everything they need, then they get a lot of stuff done. If you don’t give it to them, they don’t get much done.”
Geoff Ryan · ~2:10 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“Don’t put out work you can’t do. Just put out work you can do… If you just focus on building packages that are executable, you will get results, and you can do that at any stage of the project.”
Geoff Ryan · ~11:20 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“We push a foreman into the field, we give ’em 10 people, we say keep those guys busy, and then we starve them for information and materials… going from survival mode to planning a week takes time.”
Geoff Ryan · ~13:10 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“The difference between 45% compliant with best practices and 75% compliant, the difference is 22% busier workers.”
Geoff Ryan · ~18:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“You want a smooth progression where you start at zero and end at a hundred, and the rate of that progress bar is true to the reality of the project. If you say it’s 99%, it should be 99%, not 82.”
Orion Matthews · ~49:40 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“It’s a status that we call done but done.”
Geoff Ryan · ~50:10 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“The 4D says this facade was installed last month, and it’s not even on site. You have pictures, you have cameras… so we find the gaps, refine it, and provide a feedback loop.”
Omar Habib · ~38:30 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“It worked during COVID because it had to work. Moving forward, there still needs to be a certain amount of on-site presence… to really understand what's happening where the rubber meets the road.”
Michael Nosbisch · ~27:25 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“Maybe we'll have drones taking video on job sites so you can sit in your pajamas and tour the job… I don't think it'll ever be a hundred percent replacement.”
Chris Caddell · ~31:35 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“You can watch everything remote in your pajamas in your bedroom, but how do you know what you're looking at if you've never been there?”
Martin Darley · ~34:35 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“They were firing up literally the corporate jet to have an emergency site meeting after I showed them the progress picture of this job, while I was getting a pretty tough write-up on my schedule.”
Travis Arlitt · ~10:30 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“If you just tell them your average pace is 170 miles an hour, but we need to pick it up to 175, that’s a lot simpler and more actionable.”
Travis Arlitt · ~16:25 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“I’ve never been one to just sit on the bench. You gotta grab drawings and go do field walks and takeoffs. That’s the worst-case scenario, but you can usually tease out quite a bit of data from what you’re getting.”
Travis Arlitt · ~29:30 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“The contractor needs to do fifty percent more progress next week just to achieve the plan date they say they’re gonna meet. And then there’s not much talking anymore… It’s not gonna be story-based. It’s gonna be action-based, because it’s so in your face.”
Travis Arlitt · ~33:15 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“I would like to keep 30% of the progress bucket for that final sign-off, the torque sheet, the check sheet, the final walk… Work in progress kills your project more than you would ever imagine it would.”
Travis Arlitt · ~44:40 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“If you can get to that system, project predictability is in your pocket… you’re gonna be able to make it boring, predictable.”
Travis Arlitt · ~45:45 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Train two of an LNG, you’d expect it to go faster because you got it all worked out. He said it’s the opposite. He thinks it’s because people know that there’s no train three after it.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:03:50 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“The most important thing I did on that yard wasn’t counting pipe spools. It was the day I sat in the shade of a fence and watched a module for almost two hours… It wasn’t because I was in a meeting and busy.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:24:50 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“You go on site and you never get anything done, because you have 50 million people pulling for you all day long… Where are the damn doors?”
Christina Robinson · ~50:20 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
“Field operations people are humans: they engage with you just like another real human, versus corporate headquarters where everybody’s buttoned up… I can see through it. I see you.”
Christina Robinson · ~51:45 · ep 015 with Christina Robinson
Choosing what to fund, when to stop and how capital really moves.
“They talk about the Green Riyadh project, but in actual fact the project is a program… The park is not just a park, it’s almost like a smart park. Some of the parks actually have a stadium.”
Jovita Stander · ~18:30 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“Who’s gonna hire an oil company and give them money to do a project that old-fashioned way? It’s just not gelling.”
James Wiseman · ~9:35 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Right now there’s a lot of financial hucksters out there that are basically like: just gimme money and I’ll get some gas turbines and I’ll build you a power plant.”
James Wiseman · ~10:30 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“We’re like a cave diver, and we’ve gone all the way into the cave, and we might not have enough air to make it back out again.”
James Wiseman · ~13:10 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Battery storage is kind of like the Wild West. People have been going out there like landmen trying to buy land near electrical substations, pretty much all bought up now.”
James Wiseman · ~19:55 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Costco is building so fast, they could not get enough electricity to their facilities. So they just said: we’re gonna generate our own where we can.”
James Wiseman · ~1:10:50 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“When you’re not even connected to the grid anymore, then you know you’re winning.”
James Wiseman · ~1:11:35 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Basically 2,700 mega projects before 2030… do the math on that. It’s basically a gold rush.”
Geoff Ryan · ~20:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“A mega project is a human undertaking so large that it shapes economies, communities, and sometimes national identity… These are the modern cathedrals of industry.”
Akin Oni · ~3:45 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“You either buy to combine, or you sell to separate.”
Akin Oni · ~14:20 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“The deeper story is integration or separation: people, culture, systems. Deals succeed or fail on that front, not on spreadsheets.”
Akin Oni · ~15:10 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“If you don’t have the credibility of delivering successful projects, you are going to pay through your nose to get that money.”
Akin Oni · ~27:20 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“We had over 4,000 small-to-medium projects globally… we were delivering projects in over 150 countries, with around 70 offices. It was very difficult to identify one solution to address the needs of everybody.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~53:15 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“The final investment decision, that’s when the organization announces they have a project, and they ask the question, ‘Are we truly ready to execute this project?’”
Iwona Wilson · ~7:05 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Can this investment be trusted?”
Omer Iqbal · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
“A project can be delivered on time and on budget, and still fail as an investment.”
Omer Iqbal · ep 021 with Omer Iqbal
Budgets, burn rates, forecasts and where the money actually goes.
“A cat cracker, just that one unit, will lose $500,000 a day in lost opportunity. I've been on turnarounds that went poorly and they had to declare force majeure because they couldn't provide jet fuel to Delta.”
Grant Stead · ~6:15 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“The minute we got it overlaid, I said: they are gonna spend $80 million more than they have to. And that was absolutely true.”
Grant Stead · ~38:15 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“You've just built a module, but you didn't build it correctly. Now we're behind on the schedule, and we're paying twice to have the same thing done.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~21:10 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“If you optimize engineering and procurement to their own budgets and schedules, then construction pays the price, and construction truly represents half of the cost of any project.”
Geoff Ryan · ~9:10 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“It works out to about 10% of the total cost of the project is what’s on the table. You should not be able to move a billion-dollar project 10%. But that’s essentially what’s on the table.”
Geoff Ryan · ~18:20 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“I would love to see the world be able to create projects that aren’t over budget and over schedule all the time. It feels like people just assume: if I do a billion-dollar project, it’s gonna be late, it’s gonna be a wreck, and we accept it as fact.”
Orion Matthews · ~18:50 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“It costs you about $10 million to apply AWP on a billion-dollar project. If you realize that full 10%, you can reduce the cost of that project by a hundred million. That’s a thousand-percent return.”
Geoff Ryan · ~1:10:40 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“We’re looking for those billion-dollar lessons, and I feel like AWP and that 10% is what really sticks with me. Here’s how you can save a hundred million dollars.”
Orion Matthews · ~1:13:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“The money makes zero sense if you don’t understand the people, the scope, the risks, and how long it’s going to take. Understand those four, then cost will make sense.”
Akin Oni · ~43:40 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
“In any project, people start with setting the budget first… so sometimes it starts with 5D, then 4D, then 3D.”
Omar Habib · ~16:30 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“Every single line in both reports is calculated right; the difference is the perspective. Finance sees the project at a point in time; cost control sees the simulation of the cost.”
Omar Habib · ~55:20 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“If you want to know when a project’s gonna complete and where your progress pinch points are, you should probably keep cost out of the mix. That’s my opinion.”
Travis Arlitt · ~39:45 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“The commercial team could see that direct link… they bought the product at spot price, and I found out it saved them two hundred million dollars. I had kind of estimated fifty. I didn’t know it was that much.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:16:15 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“As soon as he saw that carryover bow wave (we’re gonna have 300,000 hours spill up to this area of the world that we’re not ready for, and it’s gonna cost us $60 million), well, yeah, let’s sign this. He signed it that week… they couldn’t sway his brain based on variances.”
Travis Arlitt · ~1:19:10 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“When you budget a billion-dollar project, you budget an average overrun of $500 million.”
Orion Matthews · ~1:09:30 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
Buying the job: vendors, packages, lead times and leverage.
“Contractors will say, 'I can bring you 300 welders overnight.' What we're seeing in the industry is missing the ramp-in by maybe 20, 30 percent; they get to peak on a three-day lag.”
Grant Stead · ~27:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“The companies that aren’t getting tariffed, everybody wants to buy from, so their lead time just went through the roof… to plan and execute, you want predictability.”
James Wiseman · ~22:40 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Modularization isn’t gonna help you if every yard that builds modules is chockablock full building LNG plants.”
James Wiseman · ~37:40 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Most of the time it's reputation… here in Alaska, people know all the players, essentially.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~39:15 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“How can you tell me the delivery is 52 weeks when the vendor gave us a proposal for 80 weeks? What is your basis? Show us the document. Do you have a signed PO?”
Tarun Gohel · ~28:20 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“You need to go out into the market and figure out what can I buy, and then you design around what you could procure. That’s the procurement, engineering, planning, construction, initiate model: the PEPSI model.”
Geoff Ryan · ~23:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“We hear about car manufacturers buying lithium mines, same thing. They’re trying to control their own supply chain.”
Geoff Ryan · ~25:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“The procurement is gonna drive the schedule… and then have a fanatical focus on holding those dates. Fly over there, see your piece of equipment being built.”
Geoff Ryan · ~36:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“We’ve seen instances where it gets built and then it goes out to the highest bidder; you’re at the back of the line again because you weren’t in that race.”
Geoff Ryan · ~36:30 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“We should be able to get the manufacturing capacity of the whole world in an app that tells us what we can get, where it’s busy, how much it is and what the level of quality is.”
Geoff Ryan · ~54:30 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“Are we going to do it internally? Outsource a team of experts? Professional services or managed services? It will vary based on project complexity, the type of industry, the internal culture of the client.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~8:20 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“It saved millions of dollars in some of the projects: cost savings, negotiation, and getting everyone on board on time.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~47:30 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
“We worked on the OnCorr proposal for two and a half years. We won the job and it was a $15 billion job.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~49:20 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
Design, deliverables and the handoffs that make or break construction.
“With solar you have to produce three times the energy you need in an eight-hour period so that you can go for 24 hours, and that’ll just get you to the next day.”
James Wiseman · ~15:30 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“We have to figure out long-duration energy storage, which we’ve barely scratched the surface on.”
James Wiseman · ~16:50 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“You inject water down one well, pump it through the rock through the fractures you’ve made, turn it into high-energy steam, and bring it up the other well. That’s enhanced geothermal in a nutshell.”
James Wiseman · ~25:45 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“A good number for steam in a power plant is around 700 degrees Fahrenheit, and drilling and completion equipment from the oil field is just not there for that kind of temperature use yet.”
James Wiseman · ~27:15 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Improvement in construction efficiency over the last 50 years, it’s not improved a lot. Manufacturing has improved dramatically. That’s what’s cool about modularization: turning part of the project into manufacturing.”
James Wiseman · ~34:15 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“A lot of times the best technical solution is not the best overall solution.”
James Wiseman · ~48:10 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“A gallon of diesel fuel just kicks the butt of every other kind of energy storage right now.”
James Wiseman · ~1:05:30 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“It’s not actually just a construction problem. It’s an engineering-procurement-construction problem… if you don’t have the drawings, you don’t have the materials, you’re not building packages.”
Geoff Ryan · ~4:30 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“Everything we build has to be modularized so it can be pulled out and the new stuff put in: the technology is gonna change every year, if not six months.”
Geoff Ryan · ~24:10 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“We used to cool with air, then we used to cool with water, now we cool with submersion. And they are three different buildings.”
Geoff Ryan · ~43:30 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“When you’re engaged in really giga-projects, you know the traditional way doesn’t work anymore. You try, and you try again… you need to know how to maximize your productivity.”
Omar Habib · ~5:10 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“2D works well for a house, and for three houses. If you’re talking about 3,000 houses, who’s going to manage this? Who’s going to coordinate it?”
Omar Habib · ~10:10 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
Terms, incentives and who carries which risk on paper.
“The document itself is not going to do the work. Document cannot walk; document cannot do the concrete cubic meter. People are going to do the work, so the document is as good as people are aware of it.”
Tarun Gohel · ~6:30 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“It’s not just dumping a document, it’s meeting them on the document.”
Tarun Gohel · ~6:25 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“You use the contract as a meeting of the minds… alignment using the contract as an alignment tool, since you’re going to use it as an enforcement tool.”
Orion Matthews · ~8:40 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“If you punish a small child, you always see the opposite reaction. But if I give my son a candy and ask him to do something, he will do it.”
Tarun Gohel · ~9:50 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“Every requirement you put in comes at a cost: nothing is free. Make sure they price for it… And if the contractor doesn’t fulfill those requirements, then instead of penalizing, you incentivize them.”
Tarun Gohel · ~11:00 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“Trying to absolve risk by having a lump-sum contract in that space is not gonna work. This is gonna be about flexibility, and maybe the emergence of true project management.”
Geoff Ryan · ~37:00 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“It's largely the same from a cost and schedule perspective. Claims can look quite different… in some countries you just go out on a golf course and reach some settlement.”
Chris Caddell · ~40:55 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“Alliance and progressive models are extremely collaborative in nature; they should be, in order to succeed. If your people are not culturally adopting that collaborative culture, you’ll be in serious problems.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~39:40 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Under design-bid-build, the engineer supervises the general contractor, two sides of one table. On a P3, all of a sudden the same teams are acting differently: the engineer who advised the owner becomes the subcontractor of the construction team.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~40:35 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“When I talk to construction companies, they are not that interested in stage gate process, because if there is a change, they just gonna ask the client to pay.”
Iwona Wilson · ~17:45 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
Change orders, trends and keeping the baseline honest.
“I've seen a $20 million change get approved in less than 24 hours.”
Grant Stead · ~19:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“By using other species, still native, the canopy cover can still be achieved… instead of 7.5 million trees, it could be seven, and the same KPI can still be met.”
Jovita Stander · ~31:20 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“If your project is 2% behind schedule, the minister wouldn’t mind. But a $50 million variation order that has to come to his desk for approval, then he wants to know every detail.”
Tarun Gohel · ~34:30 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“Change management is one of the top reasons for project failure, and it starts much earlier in the project lifecycle: from bid phase, proposal preparation and negotiation, and it continues to project closing.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~1:20:50 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Another one that I found in an old Navy training slide deck was: change is the mother of all risk… anytime there’s any talk of change, that should be a risk conversation.”
Matt Mitchell · ~1:02:30 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
“Once you pass the FID stage, it gets so much more expensive, plus it’s almost impossible to change. You are emotionally committed to your decision.”
Iwona Wilson · ~34:00 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Making changes at that stage is way cheaper than committing to change once you’re on the plane moving your family to Florida.”
Iwona Wilson · ~33:50 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
Building big while answering for carbon, community and environment.
“The irrigation will be done using treated sewage effluent… about 1,300 kilometres of irrigation network throughout the city; a hundred percent of the irrigation will be this type of water.”
Jovita Stander · ~10:45 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“When it rains, people are so happy they actually go out of the offices and film the rain. I just find that beautiful.”
Jovita Stander · ~13:20 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“The moment you see something green, it’s nice on the senses… it probably lifts your mood. At least it lifts mine.”
Jovita Stander · ~14:30 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“They identified, if I remember correctly, 72 species that are native to the area, a lot of acacias, which are thorn trees; we get them a lot in South Africa… of course palm trees.”
Jovita Stander · ~30:20 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“What is the coolest renewable energy mix right now? It’s one that’s close to oil and gas but produces energy without producing CO2. It’s got all the ingredients.”
James Wiseman · ~26:30 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“If you look at a solar panel from five years ago, the size, cost and output, and compare it to one today, it’s amazing. And look at cost and capacity for batteries: it’s the same situation.”
James Wiseman · ~1:01:45 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“When people don’t even notice what kind of energy they’re using is when you know it’s succeeding.”
James Wiseman · ~1:06:30 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“There are dirty ways to do it, and there are a few much cleaner ways that have been invented recently, and really we need to pivot to those.”
James Wiseman · ~1:15:50 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“When we are designing an infrastructure project, what are the effects on the communities, on the future economy, on future growth, on the environment? We are designing the future.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~13:40 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
The seams between parties, packages and systems: where projects leak.
“Bits and pieces are happening all around the world: design in Italy, contractors from different parts of the world. It’s a very diverse, multicultural effort going on in different hubs.”
Tarun Gohel · ~3:30 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“We import each package’s simulation into our master, we call it the federated 4D model. If someone is not following the strategy, you’ll find it immediately: his model is static. It’s not moving.”
Omar Habib · ~37:20 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“I now have a project where I manage 66 subcontractors. We have the planning meeting from day one: how the folders are structured, what code has to be in the 3D model, what the shared parameter is named.”
Omar Habib · ~34:50 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“Sometimes I call myself an integrator. I’m not a specialist in every one of them. I’m a specialist in some and a generalist in the others, but generalist to the level that I can speak the same language with you.”
Omar Habib · ~53:30 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“Integration is the action of combining two or more things in an effective way; that’s the Cambridge definition. In reality, we take the combination part and we forget about the effectiveness.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~9:30 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“Human beings manage problems by simplifying them… the problem is sometimes we oversimplify, and by oversimplifying, we isolate the systems, the behaviors, the processes, and that causes the bigger issues.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~12:10 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“In joint ventures we are dealing with totally different entities, with totally different objectives, which may not be aligned at all, except one: delivering the project successfully. So we start from the common goal.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~38:30 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“On Eglinton Crosstown, my construction team member was sitting next to me and the client was a few floors down. We really didn’t feel we were from different teams; you want to feel that you are one team.”
Ellie Moradinezhad · ~50:50 · ep 014 with Ellie Moradinezhad
“We would go directly to them, meet them at their office… and if we found deficiencies, we would just coach them and work with them to get them to do things the way that we preferred.”
Matt Mitchell · ~39:40 · ep 016 with Matt Mitchell
Getting it right the first time, and being able to prove it.
“It's a safety net… something that will help you feel confident that you're doing everything, and remind you when you're not. This checkbox, wait a minute, I didn't do that.”
Leanne Allgaier · ~59:50 · ep 004 with Leanne Allgaier
“One of the foundations I was taught as a tradesperson: the quickest way to build anything is to build it once.”
Geoff Ryan · ~41:20 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“If we are in a continuous improvement model, if you’re not doing AWP, what are you doing?”
Geoff Ryan · ~1:11:20 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“They call it RFT, right first time. Part of the piling was in the sea, so they needed to simulate it before they went there.”
Omar Habib · ~25:50 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“At that time, quality assurance and ISO 9001 was a really big thing, and for me it was a way for organizations to become more competitive, to boost their performance, build trust with customers, and really win a lot of work.”
Iwona Wilson · ~1:40 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“Most projects were compliant. They follow procedures. They use the right templates. The boxes get ticked. But many of those projects would experience challenges, and some of them would be even cancelled, and somehow I never really knew why.”
Iwona Wilson · ~11:20 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
“My audit reports after a while begin to be the same. They would report on the same issues around document control, communication, interfaces… I didn’t really feel like I’m making a big difference.”
Iwona Wilson · ~12:40 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
People, equipment and material: enough of the right thing at the right time.
“I've seen the smallest of parts shut down an entire startup. We needed a little light bulb… and you find this out five hours before you're supposed to start up.”
Grant Stead · ~20:15 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“If seven days out you don't have a name, you don't have an engagement. No ring, no date, no engagement.”
Grant Stead · ~28:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“Rare earths, some of those are not actually rare. Lithium is everywhere. But getting it into a form you can use in a battery is difficult. It takes a lot of processing.”
James Wiseman · ~1:14:15 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“If you were to throw down a big curtain at the Pacific and a big curtain at the Atlantic, we would have trouble building what we need… We’re smart, we’ve got people that wanna do it, we just need the drive to do it ourselves.”
James Wiseman · ~1:21:30 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Everyone on the [critical minerals] list is found in Alaska… and a lot of these things you need a coastline for. A lot of opportunity there.”
James Wiseman · ~1:15:20 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“We try to get the 80% value, the probability that this crane location will be used 80% of the time. Keep the crane busy 80% of the project, and this is success. That was their KPI.”
Omar Habib · ~26:40 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“When we say resources, it’s us, the people. We are the number one resource for the project… If you’re not planning your resources correctly, the project would go south.”
Ahmed AbdelSalam · ~6:20 · ep 011 with Ahmed AbdelSalam
Governance from the top: what boards ask, and what they should.
“I don’t have the answer for you now, Your Excellency, but I will get it to you as soon as we finish the meeting… I think you lose more credibility by trying to fudge it.”
Jovita Stander · ~41:20 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“In a C-level meeting, a question ends with another question. If your answer is not ready, you hear a lot of frustration… integrating the data is 70% of the job.”
Omar Habib · ~49:40 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“It's a three-year term that's boiled down to a one-year term… the commonality of all of it is we're all volunteers.”
Michael Bennink · ~43:15 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“We're mostly trying to do two things at once, work our day job and support the association as best we can… anyone that wants to volunteer to be part of those committees, absolutely, we need the help.”
Michael Nosbisch · ~46:15 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“When you look back on it, it's a blast. But it's better being a past president than being the president, that's all I'm gonna say.”
Martin Darley · ~48:25 · ep 012 with Live Panel
“He said, my board’s not gonna let me ditch the plan. And that’s not what we’re doing: the plan is now reframed. It’s still the same plan, but now we’re gonna look forward from the status state and see what we have to achieve to make the date.”
Travis Arlitt · ~34:15 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“Are leadership teams getting information that gives them clarity and confidence to approve those projects, so they can move forward, and kill those projects that are just badly framed projects?”
Iwona Wilson · ~38:45 · ep 017 with Iwona Wilson
What's in, what's out, and what it costs when nobody says.
“What does it take to grow 7.5 million trees across the capital city?”
Orion Matthews · 0:11 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“People in the neighborhood are at a maximum of 300 metres away from a green space, to encourage that healthy lifestyle.”
Jovita Stander · ~15:05 · ep 002 with Jovita Stander
“It’s a massive footprint, connecting maybe over a hundred or 150 wells, bringing those gathering lines to the central processing facilities, then storing and finally shipping. It’s an entire program.”
Tarun Gohel · ~2:20 · ep 005 with Tarun Gohel
“You have no idea how many times the project manager claims that the deliverable is complete, issued, final, but sometimes the deliverable has not even been started.”
Roger Farish · ~30:40 · ep 007 with Roger Farish
“Pick a small scope and a small timeline and execute on that, and then you can grow it from there.”
Orion Matthews · ~45:40 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
Maintenance events, shutdowns and the operating plants that projects live inside.
“A turnaround is a maintenance event at its core. But of course, we are creatures of opportunity.”
Grant Stead · ~2:30 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“You've got a $500 million turnaround: you're gonna have five to six thousand people at peak, a labor burn rate in the $8-million-a-day range, working 24/7.”
Grant Stead · ~3:45 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“You'll have maybe 200 people planning the event for a year, and then within two or three shifts you'll go up to a full staff of 4,000.”
Grant Stead · ~4:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“You're opening every tower and crawling them, cleaning them, tearing compressors apart, replacing entire piping circuits, touching every piece of equipment in that unit, like ants on an anthill.”
Grant Stead · ~4:50 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“The priority is to open everything and do your inspections. I don't wanna put anything back together; if I've got manpower, I'm tearing this unit apart.”
Grant Stead · ~15:20 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
Sending everyone home safe: the non-negotiable.
“You'll be on high-energy events where people get hot and bothered when they don't know what's happening. I use the term: no running by the pool.”
Grant Stead · ~10:00 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“The entire tower, the trays and everything, was sparkling, shiny silver… It was filled with mercury. Literally four inches of mercury at the bottom of a 120-foot tower, and no one's expecting it.”
Grant Stead · ~32:15 · ep 001 with Grant Stead
“We’re not making high-pressure flammable fluids, we’re making lithium hydroxide. Nothing was gonna blow up. That was something I learned by talking to everybody.”
James Wiseman · ~53:50 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“You add a truck or an excavator with a safety circle in the simulation. When two circles intersect, you can’t add more to increase productivity; it’s proven by calculation and by the simulation.”
Omar Habib · ~31:20 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
Numbers before there's anything to count: ranges, bias and basis.
“The estimation team studies the project, hands over the estimate, ‘enjoy, guys’, and it’s not connected. You can’t benchmark the project against what you planned in the beginning.”
Omar Habib · ~51:00 · ep 009 with Omar Habib
“I keep about forty to fifty unit rates in my pocket, and I’ve shared them on LinkedIn if anybody wants them. The Gulf Coast norms kind of get you in the ballpark; you go down to the direct work hour.”
Travis Arlitt · ~40:15 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“I said: how do you get steel to talk to pipe, to talk to equipment? He said: you just assign that unit rate… you have to use that common denominator of work hours.”
Travis Arlitt · ~42:45 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
“A project’s like a brand-new car: you don’t know how fast the thing’s gonna go. People might think you do, but I’ve seen contractors in the same part of the world, on the same project, have vastly different unit rates.”
Travis Arlitt · ~50:10 · ep 013 with Travis Arlitt
Approvals, agencies and the calendar nobody controls.
“A grid tie could take five or six years to get all the way through to where you can actually close the switch.”
James Wiseman · ~21:20 · ep 003 with James Wiseman
“Change comes from desperation. You’ve heard of the burning platform: we need a burning platform… that’s really the job of government: to encourage us to go places we don’t really want to go.”
Geoff Ryan · ~56:10 · ep 006 with Geoff Ryan
“A project without a license to operate is a project waiting to be stopped.”
Akin Oni · ~42:00 · ep 008 with Akin Oni
